#because its been my go-to game for like a decade god its so fun

[nabaath-areng]

It's kinda funny looking back on old screenshots and edits I made 3-5 years ago because in a way they have changed a LOT yet at the same time also not all although the fact that my old computer could barely handle having FFXIV installed is kinda evident in hindsight lol

[lemonbeemon]

Not to be sappy on main, but I will forever be a hater to people who say video games can't be a productive use of your time.

[stardustizuku]

So, Gushing Over Magical Girls Is The Best Thing To Happen to Magical Girls

Gushing Over Magical Girls get this bad rep. For all the wrong reasons. I’ve seen it be called an insult to Magical Girls, I’ve seen it be called “gooner bait” a term I absolutely despise but that’s a thing for another day. I’ve seen it insulted for everything and anything under the sun.

I first got acquainted with it when I was scrolling through Twitter and I saw someone complain about the PV. However, as an avid Magical Girl Fan, I wasn’t disgusted. I was intrigued.

I decided to read the manga, and oh god.

This is one of the best things I’ve read.

The story follows Utena, a shy girl that loves Magical Girls, tricked to become the evil general that will defeat the Magical Girl team “Tres Magia”.

And it’s a delight.

I binged all the episodes available to me in the manga, and had fun in each and every chapter.

The same, however, couldn’t be said by half the people who watched the anime. And I was extremely baffled. As a queer woman, this was the first time in my life, in which I had seen something so deliberately catered towards me. I saw tell-tale signs of someone who genuinely admires the genre, and is simply using it as an outlet for exploring deeper and more interesting topics that a SFW version of it would not be able to.

Yet, I turn around and I see people calling it the most horrendous stuff, and accusing everyone who likes it of being monsters or men.

Genuinely, I’ve had enough.

Gushing Over Magical Girl is not the Devil. In fact, I think it’s the best thing to come don’t even like Magical Girls AND IT SHOWS.

PART 1: “Magical girls are for little girls!”.

The first criticism you’ll see aimed at “Gushing over Magical girl” is the amount of sexually charged content it has. And it is true. It borders on straight up porn in many instances and it just gets wilder as you go on. By chapter 30, we’re way past PantyShots. Like, I’ve seen some of these girls’ vaginas, and I’m not joking.

Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with it, but there’s people who might disagree.

“Magical Girls are for little girls” some people say “and you’re corrupting it!”

Which genuinely makes me laugh.

This is because this type of argument could only be done by someone with no real concept of Magical Girls aside from maybe Sailor Moon and Sakura Card Captor.

out of the Magical Girl genre in a WHILE (Ignoring Precure, because they just gave us a magical boy and that’s my win of the decade).

People are just, you know, stupid. And reactionary. Enough that they see a boob and lose their minds like a Karen at a Christmas Eve Mall.

My point is, I love this manga. And I’m willing to risk my reputation to defend it. Cause genuinely, half the people who are clutching their pearls over this show - Magical Girl Anime haven’t always been PG, or aimed at girls.

Cutie Honey is a great example. It’s one of the most famous Magical Girl Anime you will find - and it’s a shonen. With the protagonist, Honey, being constantly naked, groped, put in suggestive situations and have outfits that show her cleavage.

And it’s one of the most famous, most popular takes on Magical Girl there is. Yet, I never see any amount of outrage towards it. (Part of me wonders if it’s because the fan service is aimed at men, rather than involving yuri).

There’s also Lyrical Nanoha, one of the most popular serial franchises there is. It spans several seasons and spinoffs, and it’s beloved by many.

And it’s aimed at older men. Yes, it’s a Seinen.

In fact, its origins are far from PG. It’s actually a Spin-off of an erotic game named “Triangle Heart”. It was most definitely not created with little girls in mind, and themes it tackles reflect as much.

There’s Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya too, a spinoff of the Fate/Stay Night VN, very obviously aimed at older men, it’s a Seinen. It has a lot of fanservice and scenes where the characters are half naked.

Day Break Illusion is also a Shonen.

And as much as I adora Madoka - I’ve been stating for years now that it isn’t a show meant for little girls. You could argue it’s for everyone, regardless of gender, who’s a little older. But it most definitely wasn’t for little girls.

So, no. This was never an “only girls” club. Trying to paint it as such, is not only wrong but ignorant.

Magical Girl shows can be for anyone. Men, boys, girls, women and I find it infantilizing to consider it “only for little girls”.

No one says “super heroes are ONLY for little boys”

Well, some do. But they’re, you know, bigots. Who don’t want girls playing or adults o have fun.

So no, Gushing Over Magical Girls being a sexually charged anime in the Seinen category isn’t “corrupting the genre”. In fact, I would argue it’s doing exactly what the genre has done in the OVA shadows for a while.

Not to mention, many people have screamed from the rooftop how they want “more mature Magical Girl shows” referring to the success of Madoka. But as soon as an actually mature take on Magical Girls shows up, tackling issues of sexuality and love, you all don’t want it anymore.

(We all know why, though. Americans, and western culture in general, considers mature themes, only that which involves violence. Anything close to discussing issues of sex is no longer “mature” but “Pornographic” and deserving of being shoved into a corner. With all queer themes, gender studies, and any nuance that could be had regarding these issues).

And speaking of sexually charged, have you watched so called “wholesome” magical girls? They’re still very much sexy. Not in the “on the nose” ecchi way Seinen and Shonen are - but they still are.

You’ll find transformations were the girls are naked, zoom in to their breasts, you’ll have panty shots every now and then. Even themes of growing up, having crushes, and innuendos about sex. Inappropriate relationships, taboo romance, and the likes.

Sakura had Rita and a professor’s relationship (mutual in the manga), Sailor Moon had Chibiusa and Elliot’s romance, Sugar Sugar Rune even having an element for ‘lust’ and other different types of love, and let’s not forget Mermaid Melody which has several instances of the girls naked, in compromising positions with other men. And I’m pretty sure Tokyo Mew Mew likely opened a whole bunch of doors for girls to be into CNC.

This is, by the way, normal.

Completely so.

These stories often talk about the girlhood experience. And girls and teenage girls are interested in all of these things. They’re interested in sex, romance, their bodies growing up, their own sexuality and the likes. It’s no wonder same-sex relationships and romance get included, they’re part of what experiencing the world through the eyes of a young girl is like.

And subsequently, it stands to reason that as people who engaged with MG grow up - they find comfort in exploring their sexuality through Magical Girl themselves. There’s a reason why there’s a growing section of “Magical Girl” in your local hentai site.

“Men get off on corrupting this wholesome girl targeted genre” is actually TERF rhetoric sneaking through the mainstream. It ignores AFAB ppl and gender nonconforming people, who grew up with Magical Girls, simply using a medium that originally started their journey of sexual identity, to explore more “grown up” aspects of that same identity.

In particular, I’m a Cis AroAce Woman. I wrote a lot of Magical Girl NSFW when I first started writing NSFW Twitter threads. They’re bad and they’re cringey. But it was something I needed.

Magical Girls were a huge part of my childhood and early teens. When I was mentally in the space to want to engage with NSFW content: it was obvious I would turn to what first sparked excitement.

So this idea that “men are corrupting Magical Girls with their sick fantasies” is nothing more than TERF-lite propaganda. People, including women and men, have been doing this for ages; for a variety of reasons. And doing so, doesn’t rob children of their spaces - but the gentrification of the internet is a story of another day.

The other argument I have heard is that GOMG is a mockery of the genre. Which is even more laughable in my opinion.

PART 2: Parodies and why I hate Earth Defender’s Club.

Gushing Over Magical Girls loves Magical Girls. It’s a parody, in a way, but it knows very well what it parodies. It’s not surface level in the slightest. And it absolutely is not mean spirited about it.

A lot of the time, shows that reference and parody the Magical Girl genre, do so in ways that feel like they view it as a lesser genre. They take generic images of cute girls in frilly outfits, swap the colors around, and have them chant over-the-top spells. You’re meant to laugh, not only at how silly they look, but people who would love it. Especially if they’re grown ups.

I do not like “Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE!” For this exact reason - even tho many people praise it to all heavens.

Because

1) It feels surface level in its commentary and depiction of Magical Girls and

2) More mocking towards the genre than paying homage or doing anything with it.

The continuous use of the word “Love” is a very obvious jab at Magical Girls using these words, which feels mean spirited just for the sake of it. Their outfits are almost exactly the same, save for the colors. And they all use the same sticks as weapon, with no thematic link for the shapes of the scepters. The mascot too (a wombat for god knows what reason), I think it’s meant to be a joke of some sort for how ridiculous some of the mascots for the girls get, which rubs me the wrong way.

In general, it feels shallow and mean spirited. But no one calls this an insult to Magical Girls. Because people who like it don't actually care about Magical Girls. They see cute boys doing silly things and love it. Which is kinda sad.

Now, Gushing Over Magical girls has sort of that same problem on the Tres Magias…But they’re not the protagonists. And even then, in later chapters, they get power ups that are different in design, and thematically linked.

The protagonist, and the ones we follow, are Utena and the girls. And they all have very distinct outfits, all with motifs that are tangentially thematically linked, and speak of each character’s personalities in interesting ways.

Utena in particular has THIS outfit. Which a lot of people don’t like, but I actually do.

It’s very obvious it’s taking inspo from other iconic Bad Girls in the genre. Namely, Utau, Kraehe and Devil Homura. All “Enemy characters” that have unhealthy obsessions with other characters. In particular, I think the wings and the feathers resemble Homura - THE character known to have a massive obsession with a Magical Girl (Madoka), to the point of insanity.

There’s also Magia Azure. Who’s a clear reference to the Mean Tsundere girl that is iconic to the genre. She’s also a Miko. Which is a callback to Sailor Mars, arguably THE girl who popularized this archetype.

I also love what they do with the mascots. Unlike Earth Defenders, where the mascot is you know, a mockery of the archetype of a mascot - useless, only there to give power ups, and obsessed with food - the mascots of GOMG is taking a book from Madoka.

It considers the mascots both all-too-powerful and yet limited in their reach. Which is exactly what the mascots have always been in Magical Girls. Beings so powerful they can give mythical powers to girls, yet helpless to do anything on their own. So, they use magical girls as a vehicle to achieve their goals. Most Magical girls try to paint this as a good thing, but newer genres shine light on how dangerous that can be too.

Madoka tackles it with Kyubey as the main initial mascot, only later to turn out to be the villain of the series.

And in a Post-Madoka world, trusting the mascots is just the slightest bit more difficult. That’s why, from the get go, GOMG portrays their mascots as morally corrupt. He’s not a good character, he’s malicious and doing more harm than good. But for the majority of the series, he’s painted more as a useless harmless evil than anything genuinely terrifying or worthy of concern. The attention is focused on other things.

But I love the way that it’s heavily implied that they’re not good. It’s a very interesting take on the mascot and it helps with the themes of the series. Which yes, by the way. Gushing Over Magical Girls has themes.

Which lead me to-

Part 3: Yeah, uhm, Gushing Over Magical Girl has themes.

There’s this idea that Sex is an inherently violent act. In which a man humiliates and sodomizes a woman, and therefore the woman is exploited in some way. And 10x worse is any act that involves BDSM. It’s violence; born out of hatred.

This is TERF rhetoric. I’m not joking. This line of thought leads directly to TERF ideas.

Many on the internet have pointed out as much, and BDSM members have gone to be very vocal about it. In particular, people on the role of the submissive (or the bottoms) are loudly trying to explain the contrary. How they like the act of sex, like the idea of being vulnerable, or being humiliated. There’s also plenty of LGBT+ stories that talk about it, both in western and eastern spaces. Just jump into the section of dom/sub verse at your local manga browsing website, and you’ll find something.

That said, the same is not as common for people who like to “dominate”.

I can only think of two pieces of media that argue that, whoever is the dominant or the sadist, is also a human being. That whatever they’re doing is done, not out of hatred for the submissive or an act of violence, but love.

One, is the husky and the white cat. In which Mo Ran, among other things, has to come to terms that his love isn’t “pure”. That he cannot love someone without the want to have sex, and to completely dominate that someone.

The second one is Gushing Over Magical Girls.

It’s very clear to me that Utena’s sadism isn’t a violent act. It’s an act born out of love. She genuinely loves the Magical Girls, and most girls for that matter, and whenever she is inflicting pain and fighting with them - what she wants is to ultimately help them in some way.

She wants them to “be the cutest version they can be” and wants them to shine brighter than ever.

There’s this one scene I love, around chapter 20, in which Baiser (Utena) is fighting Magia Azura. And due to Baiser going a bit too far, Azura ends up being Mind-broken. She crawls towards her, calls her “mistress” and begs to become her servant.

In any normal Hentai you’ll find, this is a good thing. This would be the ideal outcome. A character being turned into nothing but a sex slave for the enjoyment of the dominant.

Which is why I found it breathtaking when that didn’t happen.

Baiser is horrified by this. She does not want to break the girls, she wants them to be powerful. She wants them to win. With her, the evil one, being nothing more than a vehicle for them to be even stronger than before.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen dominant or sadist characters being presented both sexually, and in such a positive light. Much less a queer woman in the same position.

It doesn’t treat BDSM sex as a disgusting taboo act, but something born out of genuine love - and a want to see the other person be or feel better.

This is reinforced around chapter 25 where Leberblume and Loco Mùsica are fighting Baiser. For context, Loco Musica wanted to be an Idol, but had terrible singing. She uses her evil power to basically force everyone to listen to her sing (which is so reminiscent of Mermaid Melody btw). When they fight, Baiser wins, and is then set to use her new found power to “punish” Loco Musica.

Originally, Loco Musica points out how Baiser’s sadistic tendencies are “the same” as Lord Enorme, who we’ve seen uses sadism as a genuine form of punishment. Something to avoid. You behave well, because you don’t want to get hurt or humiliated by her.

However, when Baiser uses her own unique type of sadism on Loco Musica, something happens. Instead of causing her physical pain by beating her or using violence, she forces her to get naked and perform her idol song like that. This causes her to get extremely embarrassed. And in the process, she actually starts to sing really well.

This is important for two reasons

1) Baiser is actually taking into account who Musica is. It’s later revealed that Musica wanted a more frilly idol-like outfit but Lord Enorme shut it down, for the sake of a more ‘unified’ aesthetic. Baiser is not just throwing around the same treatment and punishment for all girls - what one might like, the other might hate.

2) At the end of the day, while she did the punishment, it was both embarrassing, but ultimately something that helped Musica and made her feel better.

And that’s really the key here, and why I love the series.

Sadism, sex and kinks in general are not tools of degeneracy. They’re treated as part of our experience.

Also, it’s just fun?

Part 4: Gushing Over Magical Girls is just extremely fun when you don’t have a dumb bitch yapping abt how unholy it is to see tiddies on a screen

Yeah, GOMG just has one of the most creative depictions of the most insane of kinks you’ll see - I could spent hour gushing over Nero Alice.

Seeing all these different kinks being depicted as powers and abilities that these characters have - and seeing how they interact with other people is just interesting.

The sex scenes are both hilarious and kinda sexy. Specially if you do like to see women all hot and bothered. Personally I’m not into girls (or anyone for that matter) but I have to admit the scenes were pretty hot. And there is no shame in admitting as much. No matter what the puritanical Christian on Twitter crying abt “god honoring lesbian sex” Will tell you.

I cannot begin to explain just how hype and relatable it was to see Magia Baiser defeat Lord Enorme with the power of straight up delusion, we STAN.

So, yeah.

It’s been a while since I last saw a Magical Girl Show so unashamed of being a Magical Girl Show. Unashamed of being weird, of praising the genre and just enjoying it.

My essay is titled, in part, as a joking reference to my much more popular series “MLB is the worst thing to happen to the magical girl series”. Which I still think is true.

And while, yeah, maybe GOMG isn’t the best thing to come out of the genre…I still think it’s good that it came out.

A lot of people say they want a more “mature” take on Magical Girls but - this proved to me that just isn’t the case.

Gushing over magical girls proves that the Magical Girl Genre Can Be so much more than what people think. More than glitter and sparkles, more than vapid action scenes, or what little girls want.

Much like any other genre, it can be raunchy, it can be messy, it can explore things outside of the status quo. But it can still deeply respect the source material, and the origins of it.

GOMG proves Magical Girls can be fun. Just. Straight up fun. Regardless of your age. They can serve and connect you to parts of yourself you didn’t realize you could connect to.

I hope it proves to more people that the genre can be so much more than “just for little girls” that parodies can be more than pointing and laughing, and that it can have themes beyond just, “friendship”.

Magical Girls can be so much more. You just, have to have an open mind about it.

[bonnibelleangelica]

An Australian PSA for Americans

I’m scared, people. Its come to my attention that some of you have no idea what Australia is like at all and genuinely believe we live in desert mud huts, cooking cans over a fire. So, here are some fun facts to give you a better understanding of Australia since I don’t want you thinking I’m an uneducated mud child.

1) Almost no one lives in the deserts. 90% of our populations live on the coasts (not just the east coast) in full blown, million-people cities. Imagine an American city, but everyone has a weird accent. Wifi, electricity, tiktok, teenage girls, techbros and even a few hundred Macdonald’s.

2) Kangaroos are like deer. They’re everywhere outside the cities, they don’t bother anyone and they eat grass in fields. Often times, we hit them with our cars. Possums climb our fences at night, foxes eat our chickens and magpies occasionally swoop us, though I’ve only experienced it twice.

3) It’s hot, but not that hot. We have green lawns and lakes, forests and rain storms, and in the summer, most people will only have to deal with temps of 30-35 degrees (85-95f). We dont generally get snow, but we get floods all the time.

4) Our politicians are racist too. We have a left and a right but our elections aren’t the game show yours seems to be. We also legally have to vote and everyone hates it.

5) Universal health care is cool. Sometimes emergency rooms are a little shit and our medicare doesn’t cover stuff perfectly, but as someone with multiple health problems, it’s not a health crisis by any means. Private cover is available anyway, so if you want to, u can pay for better shit.

6) Bali is our national holiday location. Everyone has been or will go at some point, its only a few hours away and everything is cheap as hell. Otherwise, bouncing between the coasts or from city to country and visa versa is the way to go.

7) A lot of Australians hate America. Some of it is fair, some of it isnt, but i thought you should know since apparently some people think everyone loves America. In my experience, the bias goes the other way.

8) Our version of rednecks are bogans. Flannel, cigarettes, beer bellies and questionable political correctness, we’ve got it all.

9) We also have a racist, problematic history of genocide and segregation. In my mothers life time, we used to steal aboriginal kids to force them to act white and “breed away the black.” Australia day (our 4th of July) is very controversial because its on the day the first real colonisation started. And at this point, a lot of people see celebrating it as support of the problematic undertones it represents. Australia flags are a relatively rare sight.

10) Lightning round! We have religion, but it isn’t really brought up very often. There are a few churches in every town, but thats it. We also don’t say the pledge of allegiance, or sing the national anthem unless its a special memorial day. Gun control has been in place for decades and most people are fine with that. And lastly, our car accident death rate is a third of America’s (adjusted for population) so maybe get on that.

If you knew all of this, thank god! I hope this is completely useless. If you didn’t know one of these, that’s fair. Maybe go follow some Australia creators and remember, there’s rich snobs and bigots in every corner of the globe.

[navpike]

i think quite a few people saying that exu divergence is a bad look after c3 are missing the point a little bit.

first of all: if c3 just wasn’t the type of story you like, that is so fine! it was very high stakes for my tastes, even if i did enjoy it! you can not like something without it being bad! that is how media works. the rest of this goes under the cut for those avoiding discourse

second: yes, c3 was messy, but that was the point! there’s no good answer to “an evil wizard wants to unleash a godeater, and now that he’s opened that door there is no closing it, and if he dies, eventually, now or in a hundred years, someone will replace him, so how are you going to fix it?”

the gang found an answer to the problem that maybe wasn’t the best, definitely wasn’t “””right””” because this isn’t black and white, but that got rid of the predathos problem, took the evil wizard’s control of the situation away, and let the people of faith keep their gods instead of removing them from the world entirely, which is a very cool answer to the issue! maybe its not what everyone wanted to happen, but it is a very creative solution, which is fun and which dnd games lend themselves to.

the point of c3, as i see it, is examining the consequences of a world that the gods have left. it’s been a THOUSAND years since divergence at this point. the gods, while they do act through their people and talk to people, are largely inaccessible to the common folk. and that’s what c3 is all about. the consequences of the gods being gone, shown through a largely non-religious party.

divergence is all about the consequences of the gods being right there, too present and too big and causing trouble and enacting miracles.

of COURSE we see the moonweaver be soft and sisterly and loving in such an overt way in divergence. she’s spent the last couple decades being loved as a mortal sister, loved just for living and loving in return.

and of course in c3 we see them vaguely disconnected and unawares of some suffering on exandria and people committing horrors in their names, primes and betrayers alike. if you got ripped away from your children for a thousand years and could only watch through a looking glass and occasionally talk to a few of them in dreams and visions and cryptic messages? you’d have to stop caring a little too, just to keep going!

the gods were so withdrawn for so long, that has to have consequences. it did. that was all of c3.

bells hells DID speak for the people. people who hadn’t had gods around for a millennia, who get overlooked as collateral in a war about gods, again. they’re not heroes. they’re a bunch of idiots all desperate for a family, who mostly cared if they could save each other, in the end, but who wanted to save others on the way if they could. they’re the people that the divergence gang would grow to be, with power and a smidge of a voice, just minus the real attachment to any gods.

there are so many parallels i could draw between garen and chetney, between the roaches and ashton, nia and fcg. divergence isn’t highlighting a failure on c3’s part. it’s showing the opposite end of the spectrum. distant gods vs overly present gods.

[wifihunters]

so due to steam sales i finally played subnautica!!

which, is a big deal since not only do i have severe thalassophobia i have like. the kind that makes me pass out at the sight of deep water. keeled over in an aquarium tunnel involuntarily. very annoying, given a lifelong fascination with the ocean/living in a location surrounded by water, so me and the ocean has just been 2+ decades of bashing myself against my body's random kill switch.

but i made it down to blood kelp/lost river so far! streamed it for my friends while playing full screen with the lights off for maximal effect (because by god i was going to either fight through it or faint trying and either way it would be funny for everyone else)

creatures dont scare me nearly as much as the vertigo of deep water, which is funny, since i have never been attacked by a leviathan, but i have gotten trapped in multiple trenches/cliffs at night where i would have rathered a reaper come try to merc me. also met a ghost leviathan before one of them.

plus, apparently i put my baby base in The location without knowing

but so far im super proud to have tackled something ive been wanting to attempt for a long time! turns out its a very fun game even though it happens to be a nuke directly to my psyche's achilles heel. its held my hand to naturally transition from "i REFUSE to exit the lifepod from the bottom at night" to "fuck this stupid slow sub im getting out and swimming home from 900m deep with nothing but the light of my thermal knife because i dont have battery for anything else"

[brummelliana]

I just played through CBML and... oh.. my god. I've been trying my best to not laugh out loud since it is almost 2 AM. I LOVED IT!!! I can't wait for the next game!

I've been scrolling through your Tumblr and you seem to know a lot about The Beatles. I've just recently started to get into the fandom. I'd just like to ask you for any book or film recommendations of the fab four? Like The Anthology book and the series or something like that. I would love to know more about them! They seem so interesting, yet so disturbing to an innocent eye..

God I don't know, my knowledge has been cultivated by so much stuff over the past 7 years. To be honest, I now just look up info I need rather than read or watch Beatles stuff for fun (besides what I mention later).

Tune In the extended edition is super super thoroguh, but it only goes up to 1962. That's right, 1000 pages (?) of just the beatles childhood and beginning of the band.

I haven't even read all my books, you know why? I spend all my time drawing bitch. I used to be such a reader. It does make it difficult when I know if I crack open a book it will be full of horrible events by these terrible naughty lads.

Just read any Biography that interests you, but keep in mind some biographers have their biases, or are less credible than others. I tend to enjoy ones that focus on a certain topic (like Beatles in Hamburg, or Beatles 1963) cause you'll have more specific information or anecdotes. The broader ones that are just about the Beatles, or about one Beatle tend to be of a similar length, and can't go into detail on everything, so tend to cover the same stuff.

I will say, don't rely on video essays or short form content (like tik toks!) for information, or at least don't take them as fact. There is a fair bit of fake info about these guys online, so be a critical thinker!

The most fun way to get a sense of the Beatle boys is to watch interviews and performances of the era. I've come to prefer straight up experiencing them from the source.

Watch the movies! A Hard Day's Night (especially considering my next game), Help!, Magical Mystery Tour, even Yellow Submarine and the Beatles Cartoon (peak).

Be careful though because post 60s Paul loves to be a fat lying slut and tells the same fucking stories over and over for literal decades. I used to have a cute little list of them.

The problem with documentaries is that they just turn into a really felatiatory circle jerk of people who really want to ride their dicks, which I find annoying.

The BeatlesVideos01 on youtube is a great source, they upload so many, there are a lot of gems of interviews and performances that aren't the most popular ones. KistuBeatles has a lot of great remastered videos.

Or right, Get Back. Watch get back, there's the beatles straight up existing for 6 hours. (even if its a very specific period for the group).

To be frank, I don't think I've watched Anthology all the way through, but I think I already heard the stuff they talk about in it, and it gets parroted in biographies cause it came out a while ago.

If you would rather look up info online (that isn't gen z slop), here are some websites I have bookmarked:

(this one has so many pictures, It was the biggest help dating all my photos)

Here's my personal as comprehensive as I can get archive of photos and videos and more!

Happy Beatling.

[cyverrieee]

[1] WITH A COSPLAYER!YUU WHO SADLY ENDED UP IN TWISTED WONDERLAND WHILE IN COSPLAY...

01 ➳ I might expload if i keep on thinking about this juicy

brainrot eating my brain into BITS anyways..

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ᴏɴᴇ ᴜɴғᴀɪᴛʜғᴜʟ ᴅᴀʏ, ᴀ ᴅᴀʏ ᴡʜᴇʀᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ʀᴇᴀʟʟʏ ᴡᴀɴᴛᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ɢᴏ ᴛᴏ ᴀɴɪᴍᴇ ᴄᴏɴᴠᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ɪs ᴡʜᴇɴ ʏᴏᴜ sᴜᴅᴅᴇɴʟʏ ɢᴇᴛ ᴛʀᴀɴsᴘᴏʀᴛᴇᴅ ɪɴᴛᴏ ᴛᴡɪsᴛᴇᴅ ᴡᴏɴᴅᴇʀʟᴀɴᴅ! ᴡʜᴀᴛ's ᴡᴏʀsᴛ ɪs ᴛʜᴀᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ᴡᴇʀᴇ sᴛɪʟʟ ɪɴ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴄᴏsᴘʟᴀʏ. ɴᴏᴡ ʏᴏᴜ ᴀᴡᴋᴡᴀʀᴅʟʏ sᴛᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ ᴀs ᴄᴏɴғᴜsᴇᴅ ᴇʏᴇs ɢᴀᴢᴇ ᴀᴛ ʏᴏᴜ...

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ʀɪᴅᴅʟᴇ ʀᴏsᴇʜᴇᴀʀᴛs

Now you were suddenly transported into twisted wonderland in your Riddle Rosehearts cosplay. This was supposed to be the day you were going to have a fun convention day with your friends who cosplayed the other Heartslabyul members. Now that you literally get to face the actual Riddle Rosehearts. You were definitely fuming with embarrassment! You laughed uncannily, the other members of Heartslabyul still incoherent shock. Especially Ace

You try to blabber out some excuses WHY you were wearing Riddle's dorm outfit! Riddle was much confused but slightly impressed. The makeup was nice, the styling of the wig was impressive. Especially the details in his atrocious outfit (if you handmade it of course).

God damnit! You were basically dying in embarrassment, you can't possibly say to Riddle that he is a fictional character in a game! No that knowledge is definitely unbearable to someone like him. But you couldn't find anymore words to describe your current predicament; your only chance was to tell.. Half of the truth!

"W-Well.. Your a famous favorite... Character back in my.. World! People loved your personality, they find you.. "

Now how to describe this? How the hell do you say something about it! Riddle was shocked. He wasn't expecting people to like his personality knowing how stern he was before his overblot.. Or even now!

You mostly spend the following hours in your Riddle cosplay, what would make it even funnier is when you and riddle would walk together, you two look the same but the only difference was in height. Obviously you were taller than Riddle. But you really slayed in those heels!

Of course, when you finally took off your Riddle cosplay was when he actually saw you. He felt like he got tricked because aint no wait some of your features just disappeared! (Your makeup skills were too good, professional catfisher!..)

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ʟᴇᴏɴᴀ ᴋɪɴɢsᴄʜᴏʟᴀʀ

Well shit. This is awkward. Its not everyday you face the character you were literally cosplaying as... You found feel a rush of embarrassment go through your head. You were wearing the fairy gala outfit of Leona with a high ponytail (because before being suddenly sucked into Twisted Wonderland. You were sweating in your cosplay and decided to put your wig up in a ponytail because it was thick)

Leona only looked at you and laughed. Okay now, this was more embarrassing than you expected. Your cosplay was a bit incomplete if you could say. You couldn't find any damn white shoes to match the outfit so EARNESTLY and EVEN SO DESPERATELY asked your own mother to borrow her silly heels that she wore on her wedding, but fuck that was like... More than a decade, thats for sure. Somehow it kinda fits you, same shoe size or whatever. It definitely caught Leona's attention knowing how you're almost at his height, yet just kick off a few more centimeters then you'll reach it!

Ruggie feels constipated seeing two Leonas sit in one room. Goddamit! Now he has to grab for two of them! Oh? One of them is real nice for no absolute reason? A nice Leona feels like a nightmare, but he'll take wha he can get. Since you can't get out of your silly cosplay, you were forcibly going around the campus with your fairy gala cosplay. A bit embarrassing but it has a few perks, people who didnt knew it was the fake Leona would have had probably been shaling their boots off. A little threatening to have something wont hurt right? Nahh, they wont know anyways. You were a Ruggie in disguise.

Sometimes, Leona would point details you missed. Like oh! You forgot this or you literally forgot to add that. He just wanted to seen as a perfect piece of art. If your cosplay is 100% handmade, he is secretly impressed by your dedication and motivation. What? This took you 6 months? HALF A YEAR? His respect kinda went up a bit. If you cosplay with your friends and family, maybe tell some stories about you and your friend/cousin/sibling dressing up as Falena and doing the scene from Lion King with your younger sibling/short friend. "Whats the Lion King Scene?" All the braincells probably left out of your brain because oh my fucking god, all you hear in your head is "LONG LIVE THE KING.." and you know.. yeah... You went silent after that, you cannot say that. Moving on!

When Leona saw you out of your cosplay, he was still secretly impressed over your makeup skills; not one for makeup himself but he just finds that you can literally become another person just with makeup impressive but he wont dare say it out loud. Professional catfisher am i right?

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ᴀᴢᴜʟ ᴀsʜᴇɴɢʀᴏᴛᴛᴏ

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Oh you cosplayed Azul? Hes fine on the outside but screaming in the inside. If the world allows you, you might hear him scream.

Jade and Floyd finds you pretty cool. You cosplayed Azul and you looked so silly and cool in it!

If you were a chubby cosplayer, Azul will scream at this point. An actual scream (not because hes scared or anything. Hes having a plentiful of positive emotions rushing through his brain.)

He will check your cosplay too! Checking every detail. Saying this like "impressive" "amazing labor!" He would definitely be shock on how much time it took you , even if his outfit is easily to replicate. Your broke ass decided to take it the hard way andake it by scratch because no money will be wasted generously.

Please show your Azul impression. He actually kinda wants to see it. If you do silly things in your Azul cosplay. He's gonna be slightly embarrassed but at some point, he might get used to it.

DID I HEAR THAT CLEARLY?! YOU MADE A PROP OF AZUL'S GOLDEN CONTRACT?! He looks at it with awe. Even though it just glossy yellow paper with some writings, its still very nice you went this far for something as someone like him.

You two will roam the hallways asking for contracts now! Just kidding (if you want to :3)

When Azul saw you without your cosplay, he still finds you amazing in your skills of makeup and stylization. Not everyone can transform themselves into another person with makeup and a measly brush no?

The professional catfisher strikes again!

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➥ ᴅɪᴅ ʏᴏᴜ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴍʏ ᴡᴏʀᴋ? ғᴇᴇʟ ғʀᴇᴇ ᴛᴏ ʀᴇʙʟᴏɢ ᴏʀ ʜᴇᴄᴋ ᴇᴠᴇɴ ғᴏʟʟᴏᴡ ᴍᴇ ʜᴇʜᴇ!

! ᴅᴏɴ'ᴛ ғᴏʀɢᴇᴛ ᴛᴏ sᴛᴀʏ ʜᴇᴀʟᴛʜʏ! ᴅʀɪɴᴋ ᴡᴀᴛᴇʀ ᴀɴᴅ ᴇᴀᴛ ғᴏᴏᴅ ᴀᴄᴄᴏʀᴅɪɴɢʟʏ !

➳ [2] 𝘒𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘮, 𝘝𝘪𝘭, 𝘐𝘥𝘪𝘢, 𝘔𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘶𝘦𝘴

ʙᴇʟᴏᴡ ʏᴏᴜ'ʟʟ sᴇᴇ ᴍʏ ᴍᴀsᴛᴇʀʟɪsᴛ!

ᴍᴀsᴛᴇʀʟɪsᴛ!

[ironunderstands]

Would be waiting for acheron brainrot ramble here

Is it time for Acheron brainrot ramble? It’s time for Acheron brainrot ramble. Prepare for the most stream of consciousness post ever, I had so much fun writing this she has taken over my consciousness and puppeted me for my own ends, and commanded me to demonstrate how peak she really is. So enjoy, hopefully I can get others to love Acheron just as much as I do.

I think there are three reasons why I like Acheron 1) she’s really fucking cool 2) I love characters who guide/mentor others 3) She’s charming as hell.

Hoyo you aren’t allowed to make characters this good.

The music in her trailer, her aesthetic, the amount of fire fucking one liners. THE COLOR RED (I’ll get into it)

“Find me, your end, my origin.” Who cooked here who wrote this who’s the chef please where’s the restaurant I’m eating this up

“On the still waters of oblivion, I guide the wandering souls” GRAHAJDJWJKSSW YES YOU DO OH MY GOD I CANT PUT INTO WORDS HOW MUCH I LOVE THIS LINE SHUT UP EVERYONE SHUT UP. Like she literally is at the edge of existence fighting to help others find their future, I just. RAAAA

SHE CUTS A BLACK HOLE IN HALF?? HUHH AUGHH a black hole that’s the manifestation of meaninglessness in the universe, and she goes “nah” and fucking obliterates it?!!?

“I weep for the departed” Those who have died are gone, and slowly losing themselves even further. For decades, centuries, millennia, even, Acheron has witnessed this, and still cries for them, still guides them to the other side, even if the task itself is meaningless, because someone should do it, someone has to do it, and that someone is HER.

She saves Aventurine, she saves the Trailblazer, she saves the entirity of Penacony. Someone blessed by the manifestation of nonexistent dedicates her life to giving others a reason to live.

Aventurine asks her why people should bother living, if the dice are always weighted in a certain outcome, then why should we keep going? Aventurine asks her why people should bother living if the universe is meaningless?

He fully expects her to say people shouldn’t.

But Acheron doesn’t do that. The dice are weighted against us. Not just in game, but in reality itself. We will all die, you will die, the people you care about will die, I might die, it remains to be seen. However, before that inevitable ending, before the curtain finally closes, we have so many choices to make. If the ending is the same for everyone, it doesn’t matter, and Acheron tells Aventurine this.

Because the Nihility envelops everyone equally, the universe is equally meaningless for everyone, nobody is the special someone destined to have a destiny. Therefore, it doesn’t matter. Aventurine has no reason to live. And Aventurine has no reason not to live. She tells him his time hasn’t come, because it hasn’t. Until that dice roll, until his final breath, Aventurine can still make choices and he can still choose to live for himself, and that’s the answer Acheron gives him.

But she knows that’s not enough. Aventurine will still struggle to live for himself, after all he’s been through, after the mountain of expectations and hopes and dreams piled onto him. So she tells him his friend has already given him the answer. Aventurine pulls out the note written by Dr. Ratio. It doesn’t give him a plan, doesn’t inform him of what expectations he has for him, doesn’t list every single reason why Aventurine should keep going. Ratio tells Aventurine to stay alive and keep on living, because he doesn’t need anything more than that, there isn’t anything more than that. Her caring about Aventurine, Ratio caring about Aventurine, that’s enough to keep him going, because other peoples love is enough of a reason to exist, universe be damned.

existing. The Existence. AKSJAKKSNDKKWEN.

Like you don’t understand, you don’t understand. ACHERON IS ENVELOPED IN THE MEANINGLESSNESS OF THE UNIVERSE BEFORE SHE FINDS ITS EXISTENCE, ITS VALUE, ITS MEANING. Even if it can never be achieved, Acheron is willing to destroy herself completely as she walks farther and farther into the Nihility trying to find the Existence, even if it takes every from her she will find it. Only by giving up her existence can Acheron find the Existence and kill the Nihility. Only by sacrificing her own life and giving up her own meaning can she give it to others.

Red. She tells the trailblazer that when they can no longer see the world in anything but black and white, there will be a brief flash of Red for them.

Red is the Existence. Red is the color of her blade that allowed her to cut that black hole in half. Red is the only color left when she unsheathes her sword. Red is the color of the tears she cries. Red is the color of the words she speaks to us that truly matter.

Red is the color she cuts into reality. In a world of black and white, in which all the light has been swallowed by IX, and the path ahead is blurry, Acheron illuminates the universe’s future in bright red, creating color, creating life, creating Existence in a world devoid of it.

We will encounter the Nihility along our journey, just as we would encounter every other aeon. The world will seem meaningless, and it will be devoid of color, but when the Trailblazer needs it the most, there will be Red. A reason to keep going, a reason to exist, a reason to keep on Trailblazing, because the path of the Trailblaze’s end is also at the Existence, and we will meet Acheron there again. Whether that color will come from us or her remains to be seen, but it will be there for us when we need it.

However, I think we/the Trailblazer will be alone. As that flash of red isn’t the only thing Acheron tells the Trailblazer.

Only when left alone can people pick themselves up. Only when help is absent can people truly fight for themselves. Only when you are alone, can you truly understand your existence.

That doesn’t mean other people don’t matter, that you have to walk the world alone, that you can only exist devoid of others. Quite the opposite actually, other people can be your reason to exist, something to help keep you going. Acheron knows this, which is why she directs Aventurine to Ratio’s note. That’s the meaning he can find in a meaningless universe.

Moreover, people help each other, they provide the tools other people need to exist, the anchors that ground people in reality, the reason why you might want to wake up in the morning, they create the things and ideas that you need and enjoy. It’s when you are ripped of these comforts, stripped of the things that make you want to keep going, is when people fight for their existence. As in a world devoid of everything, can you truly appreciate the things you have, and acknowledge that since there is now nothing, you are the only something. When there is no one there to save them, fools pick themselves up, and that is Existence.

I love Acheron. I love her silly amnesiac tendencies, I love her beautiful design, I love that she’s a Mei counterpart, but most of all, I love what she stands for.

Acheron is the indomitable human spirit personified, she quite literally chooses to exist in the face of absolute nothing. When the world loses all color, does she paint reality in a bright red with her sword, writing her own destiny with each and every slash.

And for that, I will always adore her.

[lesetoilesfous]

anyway here's my thoughts on veilguard.

i liked it! i really, genuinely enjoyed it. there were moments that made me cry and truly moved me. there were plot twists that really surprised and shocked me. i felt emotionally impacted by the game. i love so many of the characters - both companions and npcs. it's beautiful. it's fun to play.

is it a perfect game? of course not! a) there's no such thing b) gang, i thought we knew this?? it's a game that's been in development for a decade, more than 3/4 of the team got laid off, it's had its usp constantly switched around lord knows how many times. it was never going to be perfect! i went in with my expectations underground and came out with a game i liked much more than inquisition.

neither inquisition nor veilguard were ever going to be like origins and da2. the creative team changed massively between those games. but also, the world changed! the industry changed! the climate in which people were working changed! for goodness sake there was an entire pandemic!

we were never and are never going to get games like da2 and origins again because the world is different now and that's ok. it's good to have new things!

could there have been more conflict in veilguard? sure. could it have been more politically and socially sensitive? maybe. but you know what? i work in media and i know how incredibly fucking hard it is to get any kind of purse-holder to sign off on one explicitly trans character, let alone nine (by my last count): specifically and lovingly designed across a wide spectrum of voice and appearance to illustrate that non-binary is not 'girl-lite' or a third gender, it's just not binary.

we went from vivienne being BALD in inquisition because they couldn't be fucked to design afro hair to a game where it is literally not possible to have an all-white or an all-male team for the first 5 or so hours of the game. one of your team members is a south asian woman with a prosthetic leg and at no point is her disability fetishised or exoticised.

god knows its not perfect but gang i really don't think y'all are recognising how fucking much good stuff we got in this game. literally, please, give me the title of another AAA game that has this much explicit trans rep. that has this many major characters of colour written with care and thoughtfulness. this many companions who are people of colour and essential to the plot. do you know how hard that is???? and everyone got fired!!!! it took 10 years!!! despite everything they got all this through!!!

like. it's not surprising to me the game is gentler than earlier entries in the series. earlier entries in the series are also, often, VERY RACIST. as far as earlier entries in the series are concerned: transgender people don't exist (except Krem, of course, but he is one character in a very big game). they are so obviously trying so hard and in a landscape where i literally cannot think of any other game of this scale and budget that is trying at all, yeah, i'm giving them a pass!

the things that drove me nuts in previous DA games were the christian fascism, the genocide apologism, the white supremacy, the 'peaceful protest' crap, the copaganda. veilguard doesn't do that and it's amazing and heartbreaking to me that so few folks in the fandom seem to value that.

there's this thing that happens whenever a piece of media is actually, truly diverse where fandom attacks it much, much more savagely than media that is actually racist, sexist etc (supernatural vs steven universe, star wars vs dream daddy, etc). people translate the fact that it takes them a little longer to connect with characters they're unused to seeing in fiction into meaning that the art is 'objectively bad'. and then assholes with money use that violently negative reaction to justify continuing to make games without trans people or brown people or a majority of female characters.

"look! veilguard did that! nobody liked it!"

please. consider why you are reacting so much more harshly to a game like this than you did to a game where you literally led a catholic inquisition, planted your flag in indigenous people's land, and had the power to enact military law on anyone unlucky enough to come across your army of religious zealots, up to and including executions.

no one is perfect. fandom isn't activism. consumption of media isn't activism. you're allowed to dislike things and you're allowed to yell about it on the internet and it's my responsibility to block content i don't want to see. i get that.

but just in case anyone else is feeling the way i am: i liked veilguard. i think they tried really hard. i think a lot of the team got fucked over by asshole bosses and worse executives. i think the game obviously got cut short and rushed, which we knew before it came out. and i still think they wrestled a fun, emotionally impactful game out of that housefire, and that that's worth celebrating.

[anachronistic-falsehood]

#6 for the wrapped game >:]c i think number 6 songs are fun. which one got left juuuust off the top 5

THIS ONE IS NOT A SURPRISE 2 ME. god. i had this shit on repeat for ages. its not even that good a song it just scratched an itch in my brain. anyway here's some gay qsmp shit

The lights of Las Casualonas flash in Pac's eyes, leaving afterimages of the bodies around him in his vision, his head spins from alcohol, the music is deafening, and he doesn't think he's felt this alive since Cell ate his leg.

He's never been a party guy. Clubs were never his scene. But Melissa is on a stripper pole on stage and laughing as Mariana sticks a couple bills between her tits, Etoiles is half passed out at the bar and babbling to Phil in what might be French or English but it's really hard to tell, Fit is dancing with Mike in the corner and looks really fucking hot covered in sweat like that Jesus fucking Christ, and everyone else, all of Pac's friends and family, are dancing and drinking and having fun like they're going to die tomorrow.

With everything else that's been happening lately, they all needed this.

He stumbles into a body and giggles, struggling to keep his balance. "Sorry, sorry," he mutters. "I'm just--I need another drink."

The person turns around and his heart leaps into his throat. Cell. Cellbit. Not--not Cell. He's hasn't been Cell in years. Like, a decade, probably. Has it been that long since Alcatraz? Damn.

Cellbit looks at him, eyes hazy, and oh, yeah, he's also drunk as fuck, isn't he? He's got a drink in his hand, and it's something red, and there's a drop of it on the corner of his mouth, and Pac isn't sure if he wants to run away or lick it off his face.

No, he shouldn't do that. Down, boy. Chill.

Cellbit smiles, his too-sharp teeth glinting in the light, and there's a slight red tint to them because of whatever he's drinking, and Pac wishes it was his blood in that cup. What? Who said that. No one said that. No one said--anything. He's normal.

"Queridinho," Cellbit purrs--literally, like a fucking cat, shit, and Pac feels like an electrical current has been sent down his spine. Fucking hell.

He looks so much like Cell. He is Cell, just--older. Different. Hotter. Pac finds himself giggling again. This is weird. Nice, though. Man, Cellbit is sexy. Pac wants to, like, open up his ribs and crawl into his chest cavity, or something. No, that's weirder. He's drunk. Whatever.

He stumbles, and Cellbit holds out his arms to steady him, drink sloshing in his cup. "Woah. Peqi, how many drinks have you had?"

Pac tries to count on his fingers, but trying to focus on them is hard. He giggles again and leans his forehead on Cellbit's shoulder.

"Mmmmm, a few," he mutters, and he's not even sure if he's talking loud enough for Cellbit to hear.

Then Cellbit's giggling, and Pac stumbles into him, and they've got an armful of each other, Cellbit's drink spilling a little on Pac's pants, but who cares anymore, really? This is nice. This is really nice.

Pac pulls away just enough to look at Cell's face--Cellbit's face, god dammit, they're--different people. Kind of. Not really. That's how Pac likes to think about it, but Cellbit looks a lot like Cell right now, looking down at Pac like he's--like he's a rabbit and Cell is a wolf. Or something. That's hot. Also terrifying. Mostly hot though.

Cellbit holds up his drink like an offering, staring at Pac, waiting.

Pac leans forward and places his lips on the rim of the cup. Cellbit gently tips it, letting Pac get a sip of what's in it. Cranberry and raspberry juice, mostly, with some vodka. Hm. Not bad.

Cellbit lowers the cup, then immediately leans in to press a kiss to Pac's lips, way too quick and way too chaste. "Want another drink?" he mutters, mere centimetres from Pac's mouth.

Pac nods. Cellbit takes his hand and starts dragging him through the crowd towards the bar. Pac smiles, holds on tight, and lets Cell sweep him away in the flashing lights.

[welcome-to-the-end-of-eras]

Live Read - The Hymn to Dionysus

IT'S TIIIIIIIIIIIME.

Spoiler-free observations:

I WISH there was an option to get the UK cover in the US. I do actually like the US cover a lot I just like the UK cover better, and I like how much it would match with my copy of The Kingdoms

So from the description, it looks like Dionysus is going to fully be a character??? Like interacting directly with Phaidros??? Is it like a Percy Jackson scenario where they have like human forms and shit??? Inch resting.

It makes me SO HAPPY seeing the list of Natasha Pulley's work almost takes up a full page at the front of my book

The new narration style is very interesting tbh, I don't know if it's because he's supposed to be a child at this point and children are a lot more straightforward, or if it's just how he always is???

The prologue sounds a lot more like the typical narration style so I think it probably is meant to be a bit more childlike in the beginning

Maybe this is me being delusional but...is she talking about the pulleyverse as a whole in the prologue??? Starting in the middle, with bits artfully left out to Reveal Unto You Later??? Is this like the very beginning??? It is the earliest chronologically so ig it must be???

"But I was distracted by a green bird and money was boring" HE'S SO REAL FOR THAT-

I'm liking the way that everything is being explained upfront. It's probably out of necessity since the average person can conceptualize life in Victorian London or Soviet Russia a lot easier than Ancient Greece, but it also does feel a lot more child-like that really hammers home the idea that the story is in its beginning

Wait wait wait, Helios is 15??? I've been picturing him as a grown man this whole time??? Damn this is about to get sad.

This is probably going to be my shortest live read yet because I'm already getting so invested that I can't keep up

Also Helios and Agave using a KITE for the lightning rod to get rid of the baby gave very much Agatha and Missouri vibes. She's also used the word "filigree" like four times now. Inch Resting.

I really don't know how to word this eloquently but the ship turning into pear trees that eventually saved Phaidros' life reminds me of the mechanical pear tree Thaniel took from the workshop, and how Grace made the workers cut them down, and all that fun stuff. Surely that wasn't the original intention (unless Ms. Pulley is playing the long game), but the connections make me happy

Also Phaidros lowkey hallucinating for a decade because he was in such close contact with a god is giving The Salt Miracles a little bit.

Pls Phaidros is such a dad with his little knights I adore himb

My brother in christ how is your biggest op a 15 year old kid named Jason-

I like the way the narration style slowly shifts to a more adult tone while keeping the overall personality consistent (Natasha Pulley best writer on earth confirmed???)

So does Agave remember Phaidros at all??? Does she know that him breaking rank is what caused Helios to die??? Does she know that it was him and Helios who stole the baby she wanted dead??? Pls I need to know

I hope to god there are wlw in this book. Idk why I've been thinking that but I WILL start foaming at the mouth.

"...even Jason, unfortunately, failed to vaporize" MY BROTHER IN CHRIST-

Are the marvels the same sort of thing as the statues from tbs??? Helios assumed they had gears and shit but nobody has ever opened them to check???

He made Phaidros-specific sign language for "where the fuck is Jason" WHY IS YOUR BIGGEST OP A CHILD-

Wrong, he has two ops; Jason and all of Athens.

I’ve tried explaining why age gaps in the pulleyverse are generally not the toxic evil kind that people generally dismiss without a second thought, but most of the time it comes off long-winded and defensive when I don’t mean to be defensive. The way Phaidros describes his partnership with Helios just gave me the PERFECT way to word it tho: Pulley is extremely aware of the way age gaps can affect both people in a relationship, and she really does not shy away from the insecurity it brings out in people, making it very realistic and easy to empathise with while not falling back onto toxic stereotypes

“…I said, with evil in my heart.” SOLIDARITY MY BROTHER!!!

Take a shot every time the word “filigree” comes up jesus christ-

Phaidros is a little PRICK leading that guard around on errands instead of doing anything useful, I love himb sm

He gave him a mask??? Welcome to the cult of Dionysus babey

“…and I would make him eat his fucking mask” GIRL CHILLLLL MY GOODNESS

“Make him eat his mask” my brother in Christ he made you eat your WORDS!!! And now you’re in PRISON!!! Dumb bitch (affectionate)

Lowkey I’m LIVING for the chaotic x orderly dynamic they have going on, I think it’s hilarious and very cute (but also I like the idea that over time Phaidros will learn to let loose more and Dionysus will develop more of a sense of duty and honour)

“He sounded genuinely cheerful, the bastard.” I fucking LOVE Phaidros being a grumpy bitch, thank you Ms. Pulley’s brother for convincing her to make him more of a bitch

“…he would take that as a hilarious challenge and try to lick me.” PLS WHY DO YOU THINK HE’S A DOG-

Also is his name not actually Dionysus??? Does he have like a birth name and then decide to become Dionysus permanently??? This vow is 100% getting broken and I’ll definitely find out but I must say I’m interested af now

Imagine how awful it would be if you came back from a war and the government was so “happy” with your performance they forced three creepy strangers to live in your house. That’s so fucked.

Wait wait wait, didn’t a pack of wolves in tbs die the same way as the wolf and the fox here??? My theory about the marvels is looking pretty good 👀👀👀

Is Dionysus doing all of this??? And, better question, is he AWARE he’s doing all this??? Because it seems to me like he genuinely has no clue what all the stuff with the wine and the madness is, but those are quite literally the hallmarks of Dionysus, and he seemed very aware of the ship turning to ivy and all that jazz??? I’m very confused

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE’S GHOSTS IN THE FOG 😀😀😀 WHAT’S THAT ABOUT 😀😀😀

Chemicals in the ground are making people sick…but it’s actually a god…hmmm…it’s giving alternate thlovk ending…

“…where is this rancid shame coming from, who did this to you?” I’M LEVITATING

I haven’t counted the pages yet but I think Phaidros is the new record holder for “pulleyverse narrators refraining from mentioning their love interest” which is fun.

…well now I feel bad for calling the triplets creepy

I’m slightly more than halfway through the book now and that makes me extremely sad, I don’t want to be finished with it

Wait is Katsu like…a mini marvel??? Is that pretty much what he is??? And they just put him in a little fish tank and let him take socks and have beef with next door’s cat???

(I got wrapped up again and am almost finished oops)

So Phaidros canonically has never seen his reflection in a mirror in his life, and we STILL have more canon information about what he looks like than Thaniel. That’s so fucking funny to me-

Okay!!! Book finished!!! And…holy shit!!! I forget how genuinely blown away I can be by Natasha Pulley’s writing until I read something new she’s written but my god was that good. It had almost an eldritch horror vibe to it while somehow also being pleasant that I really enjoyed??? And obviously I was a Percy Jackson kid (if you couldn’t tell by the everything about me) so I’m thrilled about the Ancient Greek elements and the elements of stories I could recognise from all that strewn throughout. But the characters were utterly and completely brilliant, the story was so expertly crafted, and obviously this is standard with Ms Pulley but it’s just especially poignant rn. I don’t think I can be more eloquent at the moment but. Yeah. 100000/10, no notes (except there were quite a few spelling mistakes in my copy but I kinda love it)

Edit a few days later: the way I completely thought I got this post out of my drafts 🧎‍♀️‍➡️anyways no new opinions really, the aftg worms are still eating my brain, but I really REALLY want to get back into doing my pulleyverse headcanon posts so if anyone wants to send me any requests I would be very grateful.

[vigilskeep]

i can't remember if you ever mentioned this but out of curiosity, which of your inquisitors did you put in veilguard? + what did you think about how they were presented in game and does it differ from your own characterization

to be honest. the inquisitor simply does not mean that much to me. so having somebody there, with a face that looked vaguely right, saying generic lines was like :| okay. it was basically like having another npc there to me jgsjsksk

i input toramar cadash, who was the guy i was playing right before veilguard whose playthrough i didn’t finish in time lmao. i guess nothing was that OUT of character... it truly washed right over me. normally i would say he should have been grouchier but also it’s been a decade of living with josie you can forgive a guy for mellowing out. i don’t think i felt anything about him until right at the end when he was on screen with solas and i was like wait fuck these guys know each other! i was there! and remembered that i still believe solas was in love with him lmao. so that scene specifically was fun sure. god knows what he said in it i played that at like 5am

but then i haven’t had toram for that long. maybe i would feel differently if i had put in, like, arthur, who i have never gotten that far with in dai but is on a technicality my oldest dragon age oc. or nennaia who is the only one i actually finished the base game with. i’ve input her with my new thorne purely because she makes opposite decisions to toram (chantry inquisition + prepared to stop solas by whatever means necessary) and i’m curious abt the differences. also, gilf <3

veilguard and its lack of worldstate is for better or worse facilitating me caring about inquisition even less because i don’t have to think about it to engage with the current state of thedas 😭 truly we’re never going to get me through trespasser lads

[thorough-witness-enjoyer]

Hi hi!

I loved your rants on the Traveler and read your pinned post and was just curious to hear about your destiny OCs (or anything else you want to talk about honestly)! Please ramble as it's always a good time to read to have someone go on in detail about their interests.

Light be with you!

Greetings!!!

This was such a sweet message and I’m delighted that you found an interest in the things I discuss on this blog!!! Thank you so much for the kind words and for wanting to hear about my ocs!!

Okay so we have- *I fall down a comically long flight of stairs with my box of ocs as they go everywhere* Sorry, sorry!

Truth be told, I have a LOT of ocs from all the different species and societies of Destiny as I have been into the game for practically two-thirds of my life, more than I can possibly disclose in just one post (especially because I can talk forever about these things!!)

So, I thought it would be fun if I described my many characters and their stories as silly blog/news titles and opening statements! This is only a small handful of my ocs, but if you guys want more or see one idea you’d like to hear more of, I’ll consider posting additional content of them!

Here we go:

Infamous deathsinger-school drop out meets agoraphobic Eliksni captain at Eliksni-Hive bar, requires his and his sardonic, elder dreg‘s protection against her vengeful knight sister.

Small Uluran girl tends to her family farm with her Psion in-house caretaker, finds out the only thing more troubling than a poor harvest is Torobatl politics as her caretaker brings his fragile partner into the household.

Local Last City ghost sees success at the opening of her new therapy café despite not having hands and only employing other guardian-less ghosts.

Top ten activities to do with the goat your Witness does not approve of, but your acolytes adore! (Number 4 will certainly unleash its rage!)

BREAKING: Awoken guardian and her exo best friend are kicked out of Spider‘s Palace after starting a drunken fight over a gambling dispute for the 20th time. “I remember being young, desired, out until dawn, and unbothered by responsibilities” says their middle-aged Psion fiduciary.

This Vex harpy enjoys listening to a vagrant exo hunter play his flute and doesn’t enjoy Minotaurs at all according to the vagrant hunter that menacingly approached us.

EXCLUSIVE: We interviewed the Young Wolf on why they continue to slay gods and they said “There really isn’t much else to do and my only friends are Ghost and Crow”.

Hundreds dead and thousands more injured after a fairy betrayal in the Court of Understanding left the Great Navigator paranoid that necromancy was spreading amongst his closest circle (A fairy is a Hive class I invented that is akin to court jesters for the upper class, especially the Osmium siblings. They are light-weight and agile, possessing the ability to float, while also wielding long-range weaponry. I definitely plan to explain this concept in the future and perhaps provide artwork for them!)

Long lost sibling of the architect of The Witness found in reclusive cabin with non-verbal child, told us to “Fuck off” and “Tell that disturbed prophet I want nothing to do with them”.

How to answer your young child when they start asking questions like “Why do our neighbors have four arms?” and “If the Final Shape happens, do I still have to go to school?”: A guide written by an average Last City dad with a curious daughter.

Whats better than the daughter of a baron and a cynical knight running away to live a life of piracy and blasphemy together? Studies show it’s the daughter of a baron and a cynical knight doing all of that AND being lesbians.

Renowned Hive romantic novelist takes acolyte playwright under his wing after their work reaches acclaim in the Court of War for its depiction of the Eater of Hope’s trials with redemption and love. “This will definitely win back the hat loving wizard that I had spawn with” the novelist claimed as he flipped his decadent cape.

Old Psion yells “All paracasual beings need to die in their rotting entitlement, especially that red bloated bastard and that big eyed freak he calls ‘My Mistress’!”and immediately dies after telling his aids about his time spent directly under Nezarec.

HEARTWARMING: This Lubraen stalker welcomes newcomers by giving them a tour around the city and making their bigotry apparent.

Is this the style of the summer? Qugu person sports new curled tendril mane as they embrace the end of everything.

She’s a beefy wizard, he’s a scrawny knight, they are irritating rivals: The couple that fell in love again after becoming lucent thanks to their devoted spawn.

Potential assassin of the Witness found and held under that black liquid it comes out of until their will falters. “I had to do something to protect them. No one protected my planet. I didn’t care how much I’d pay for it” stated the now-disciple fish creature.

I have tons of concepts remaining and I thoroughly love all these characters, but I don’t want this post to be too long!! I adore expanding on unexplored areas of Destiny lore and I wish I had the time to make content for my ideas!!

Thank you again for the question and I hope I adequately answered it!! Light be with you too!!

[thewadapan]

Multimedia & the Multiverse in Magic: The Gathering

I've got a nasty habit of, instead of reading "good, fun, meaningful" stories, devoting enormous portions of my time to pure hack shit, cynical works of corporate art that have little value as texts on their own merits, but rather through the intertextuality they share.

Anyway, the other week I sort of blacked out, and when I came to there was a spreadsheet on my monitor, with 1,251 rows corresponding to 1,251 storyline sources for Magic: The Gathering—the famous fantasy trading card game from Dungeons & Dragons manufacturer Wizards of the Coast—meticulously arranged into publication order. I'm not, like, doing so hot, at the moment.

So having spent a couple of days doing that, I sat down to work out where to start, and I eventually settled on the short webcomics leading up to the publication of Agents of Artifice, a novel by Ari Marmell. Was it any good? Tap that "Keep reading" button to find out. Uh, eventually.

I. A potted timeline of Magic: The Gathering media

The history of Magic: The Gathering is riddled with bizarre, sweeping changes in the big-picture corporate strategy, where a huge shift in the product will be announced, as if to say "This is it! We've solved it now! This is how MTG is going to work for the rest of time!" And then two years later, the decision is completely overturned, replaced with some other, new initiative that promises to fix the game forever. In some ways, MTG has lasted so long precisely because of its willingness to innovate, to experiment, to throw itself wholeheartedly at an idea and then throw up its hands in a mea culpa when everyone inevitably hates it. From its earliest days, when Wizards of the Coast began publishing its own magazine, The Duelist, the corporate culture has revolved around transparency; designer Mark Rosewater has outputted god knows how many words across articles, podcasts and social media posts, fielding endless questions from a horde of mostly-intelligent fans who seem to passionately hate the thing they love. I cannot imagine having this many hours in the day. But as a result, I can think of no other game—in fact, no other piece of art, period—where the physical process of its creation is so well-documented and so well-understood.

And it's perhaps because of all this disclosure of corporate thought processes, that to me, as a fairweather fan who's been following along for a while, many of the biggest decisions have struck me as almost embarrassingly obvious in hindsight: "How are y'all only figuring this out now?"

Agents of Artifice is kind of a perfect case study. It was the first in what was intended to be a long-running series of "A Planeswalker Novel"s, books by different writers with a more character-centric approach than MTG stories had traditionally taken up to that point. See, the big defining gimmick of the MTG setting is that it's a vast multiverse of these different planes of existence. You, metatextually, are a "Planeswalker", who can travel these worlds, and your (non-diegetic) deck of cards represents the spells and creatures you have collected from them.

But bizarrely, for fully the first decade of the game's history, from 1993-2003, the actual MTG storyline seemed to have an almost pathological disinterest in this basic premise. Nearly all of the expansions were set on a single plane, Dominaria, just across different time periods, only occasionally dipping into other planes, which were usually dreamt up and forgotten by whichever writer needed them for their particular story beat. The Planeswalkers, as depicted in canon, are long-lived godlike mages, less protagonists, and more lore. Until 1997, the tie-in media was a slate of novels and comics, respectively published by external companies HarperPrism and ARMADA, written by a fuckton of freelancers who didn't seem to be coordinating with Wizards, let alone with each other. And I'll be honest: I haven't read any of it, because so far as I can tell, for all intents and purposes, there is nothing to distinguish this stuff from the rest of the yellowy fantasy volumes from the '90s with names like "The Sword of Life" stacked sideways in piles in secondhand bookstores, from the cigarette-ash-covered floppies slumping over in wicker baskets, covers pulling away from the staples. Not even in that they relate to a card game: many of these seem to be MTG stories in name only, featuring characters and settings who never so much as appeared on a card.

In 1997, all the publishing stuff was brought in-house, all this material was declared semi-canon, "pre-revisionist", and an effort was made to tell a single coherent story across the cards and the books. This was the "Weatherlight Saga", which (I think) followed the crew of a plane-hopping skyship as they battled the forces of Phyrexia, a race of... machine zombies, I guess is the best way to put it? Anyway, mixed success. I gather the cards suffered from needing to relate to the story, and that the story itself was simultaneously a bit overly-formulaic and hamstrung by changing plans at Wizards.

In 2003, the decision was finally made to have each year's expansions take place on a different plane. Y'know, like in the premise of the game. So you've got this world of metal, a world inspired by Japanese folklore, Dominaria again, a world that's an endless city, a world inspired by Celtic folklore, and they each have their own really distinct feel and character. If anything, too distinct: it's hard to get invested in these worlds, because a year later, you won't be seeing these characters again. The broad format of the story continued, a novel accompanying each expansion, I'm led to believe of similar middling quality.

So in 2007, there's this thing called the "Mending", which is basically an in-universe excuse to nerf all the Planeswalkers, to make them more #relatable and, more importantly, to allow them to be depicted in the game itself, as a special card type, without ludicrously overpowering everything else. Lorwyn introduced five new Planewalkers, one for each of the five colours of magic, to serve as the audience's POV into the MTG multiverse going forward. And although I'm biased, because I started playing in 2011, I would say this was when MTG finally got around to fulfilling the promise of its premise. The idea was that every year there would be a "block novel", concerned with the events on that year's setting, and twice a year there would be "A Planewalker Novel", which would further the long-term character arcs.

Two came out in 2009. A third, The Curse of the Chain Veil, was written and solicited, then cancelled. Brady Dommermuth, former creative director on MTG, said a couple of years later:

Unlike publishing companies who usually buy a book and publish it only if it's already good enough, we commissioned books on spec and had to publish what we got (after a few precious weeks of revision), regardless of how the final draft turned out. Only one book differed so sharply from our expectation that we elected not to publish it. You can probably figure out which.

The fourth, Test of Metal, did make it to publication but has apparently be decanonised with prejudice, so far as I can tell. After that, Wizards was done with print novels for MTG. There were a couple of ebooks, these written by the in-house writing staff rather than freelancers, accompanied by throwaway online short stories, which in 2014 became the main outlet for the storyline. In 2015 there was another big effort to refocus on a core cast of Planeswalkers, who became the "Gatewatch"—look, they were just doing Avengers, The Avengers had happened three years ago and people liked it back then. In 2019, they tried to switch back to novels (I'm guessing the Amazon fantasy slop publishing boom made that more viable again? Sidenote, Brandon Sanderson wrote a novella for them for free), there were a couple of books by Greg Weisman, people fucking hated them, they cancelled the next one they had in the can, and by 2020 they were back to webfiction, where they've languished comfortably ever since.

And this is just what was going on with the prose stuff. Boy, they were doing such things to that card game. They were really having a go of it with comics, too, though in the end those wound up being their own continuity. There was a Netflix animated show in production in 2019, with the fucking Russo brothers (see?) exec producing, later replaced by Jeff Kline (of Transformers: Prime, Wizards of the Coast having been acquired by Hasbro back in '99, and eventually becoming one of their biggest moneymakers thanks to everyone and their mum owning a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Player's Guide). I'm pretty sure it's been fully written, almost certainly voiced, and hell, probably animated too, like the Micronauts cartoon, and I'm 90% sure it's never coming out, and even if it did, it would be dreck anyway, right? Django Wexler apparently wrote a prequel novel for it, which exists as a file on a computer somewhere. Also in 2020 they were doing a live-action show too. They wanted Angelina Jolie to play Liliana Vess. Having just read Agents of Artifice, I am laughing my ass off.

See, what I'm getting at with all of this is that over the last ten years, Magic: The Gathering has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light. The Magic 2014 Core Set was released with one of the five Lorwyn Planeswalkers, pyromancer Chandra Nalaar, as its poster girl. The branding across the products and tie-in video game all looked more or less like this:

I remember that even as a teen I was embarrassed by this, possessed of some notion that we'd kind of moved on from boob plate, culturally. And sure enough, companies like Wizards of the Coast are realising that you can make way more money if you don't limit your consumer base to straight white guys aged 16-35. By the time of the Gatewatch stuff, I gather that Chandra was being explicitly written as- well, not gay, as I expect that would've been difficult to square with her earlier portrayals, but certainly bi. So by 2019, when that Weisman novel came out, for some godforaken reason there's multiple bits in there about how Chandra is totally straight, and she and Nissa are totally besties, and everyone kicked off, from the sounds of it rightly so.

II. State of play

Look, I don't want to make generalisations about the current state of MTG fiction. There seems to be a stable of writers, and for each new expansion, one of them will take the reins for the accompanying storyline, with other contributors chiming in for side-stories. It's a lot of different voices, with their own strengths and weaknesses. I started playing again with Phyrexia: All Will Be One, mostly on the back of "holy shit, Phyrexia, I remember those guys!", which I gather was the intended effect. I followed along with the webfiction for five expansions total.

Of the stuff I read, most of it's not great!

If you're someone who cares about prose, well, you're not going to find much to like there. These are professional writers, who have editors, so there's a baseline competency you're lucky to see in amateur webfic. But for the most part it's workmanlike stuff. Here's a sample that really jumped out at me when I was reading the Murders at Karlov Manor storyline:

"No, no! Not you! I can't tell you! I can tell Ezrim. Only Ezrim. Can you get me to him without being seen? Is that within your power, oh great detective?" The way he spoke the words, they weren't praise. He turned them into a cutting insult, and Etrata glanced to Proft to see how the man would react.

That entire second paragraph exists to explain that the phrase "oh great detective" is being spoken sarcastically. My, such subtlety, so cleverly challenging the reader's expectations, and what beautiful command of language too! See, the way I just wrote that sentence, that wasn't praise, that was a cutting insult. I can do it too.

What about the fantasy storytelling, then, is it entertaining and memorable? Well, occasionally. In the March of the Machine storyline, there's some fun clash-of-aesthetics stuff, with the Giger-esque Phyrexians butting up against the Gothic horror of Innistrad, or the fairytale creatures of Eldraine, or the New Capenna gangsters. And this aesthetic mishmash is where Wizards seems to want to take the property; their latest big status-quo shake-up, at the end of the story, sees most of the Planeswalkers lose the Sparks that let them planeswalk, with "Omenpaths" instead connecting the worlds to allow all kinds of beings to pass between them at random. This defines the story of Outlaws of Thunder Junction, dubbed a "Showcase set", which brings a bunch of characters and objects from across the multiverse onto a single setting with a specific theme, in this case, cowboys; it also defines Aetherdrift, a "Travelogue set", which instead creates the aesthetic juxtaposition by spanning across a whole bunch of planes, in this instance through a death race.

Much as the Mending served to allow the introduction of Planeswalker cards, the "Desparkening" (which, come to think of it, really smacks of the Avengers Thanos snap, doesn't it?) serves the needs of the game designers: the meteoric rise of the Commander format to be the predominant way people play MTG meant that Planeswalker cards were less desirable, as they couldn't be played as Commanders, meaning it's actually more commercially beneficial if more of the popular characters can use the Commander-friendly Legendary Creature cardtype instead.

In MTG development jargon, there are two types of expansion: "bottom-up", the traditional style, which start by concepting the gameplay mechanics and then nail down a setting to suit them; and "top-down", which start with a high-concept setting idea and then develop gameplay mechanics to fit that. In terms of the game itself top-down design has won out, decisively, but I would argue that modern Magic: The Gathering storytelling is actually stuck awkwardly in the middle. The Omenpaths are clearly a "bottom-up" storytelling choice, informed by the material needs of the game. But you can also see the stories struggling against the "top-down" pitch for each expansion: Murders at Karlov Manor is an entire set themed around murder-mystery, but the writer for the stories is, put bluntly, not a mystery writer, so structurally and narratively the webfiction really struggles to execute on the basic formula for the genre, and can't deliver the feeling of "cleverness" that makes murder mysteries work. March of the Machine is meant to be an apocalyptic multiversal war story with an unstoppable enemy, with a sprawling scope and stakes that have never been higher... but because the entire thing needs to be wrapped up within a single expansion, it ends up being an almost farcical parade of the Phyrexians visiting these other planes and just completely jobbing, totally beefing it, in the end the heroes show up and just cut the big bad's head off and the day is saved.

It's honestly kind of a fascinating mode of storytelling, when you step back and really look at it. Corporate needs a story to resemble a certain genre, to hit certain beats that they can commission certain art pieces for to put on certain cards. In Wilds of Eldraine, there's this whole thing about these three evil witches, and the witch associated with one of the set's chase cards just gets shoved into her cauldron maybe a third of the way into the webfiction. Eldraine as a whole has a problem where it needs to pull from a specific canon of well-known fairytales, making it feel more like a jumble of references than a fantasy world in its own right.

Again, Mark Rosewater is actually very open about this creative choice: players react well to things they recognise. His "keep it simple, stupid" philosophy can be traced as far back as the Weatherlight Saga—which he had a big hand in—as I'm told the whole thing is very heroes-journey, very Star Wars. I haven't read that stuff; why would I, if I've seen Star Wars? The point is that Rosewater believes that iconic symbols, characters, stories, are iconic for good reason, because they resonate with audiences. All the numbers back him up. Money talks. Consistently, the most profitable Magic: The Gathering sets are not those with original worldbuilding... but rather, the "Universes Beyond" products, which consist of cards depicting established properties, like The Lord of the Rings, Warhammer 40,000, Doctor Who, and Fallout. There's a Spider-Man set coming out. We exist in the age of the perpetual crossover, a rich multiverse where every property gets to collab with every other. And to make space for more of these products, the number of original expansions has been reduced.

There are some signifiers, though, which aren't trademarked: things like cyberpunk (Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty), the '80s (Duskmourn: House of Horror), outer space (Edge of Eternities). Or, in particular, real-world international culture and history. The tension between fantasy as a genre and real-world culture has always existed, and Dungeons & Dragons in particular has grappled with the racial stereotyping and cultural appropriation that informs much of its basic lore. In Magic: The Gathering, there are an increasing number of planes based on mythology from around the world—see this map, which hilariously suggests that North America has "not enough history to adapt into fantasy". It's hard to point the finger at the expansion that started this practise: was it Arabian Nights, the very first expansion, where Richard Garfield literally just lifted the entire flavour of the set from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights? Maybe 1996's Mirage, which the wiki helpfully tells me had a "tropical African-themed setting"? Maybe 1999's Portal Three Kingdoms, intended for Asian markets and set in a period of Chinese history, or 2004's Champions of Kamigawa, with its premise Dommermuth described as "Shinto gone wrong"? Actually, yeah, I feel like it's probably Kamigawa.

Really, though, it's 2013's Ancient Greek mythology-inspired Theros that ushered in the modern era of fantasy tourism. Since then, there's been steady releases along similar lines, where it's like a find+replace has been done on all the Proper Nouns for made-up trademarks with similar mouthfeel. Like Disney with its animated features, it feels like Wizards of the Coast is sort of running out of parts of the world to mine for content. Speaking of mining, did you know that Lost Caverns of Ixalan, which returned to MTG's native Mesoamerica-inspired plane, was conceived as an underground set based on the popularity of Minecraft? There's a postcolonialist thread in that set about Quintorious, an elephant Planeswalker who's visiting the plane for research, where as I recall he has something of a crisis of conscience over whether he's just mining this other culture for his own academic success. Quintorious comes from a Harry Potter-inspired set.

And listen, I'm not going to sit here and pretend these sets haven't been meaningful for a lot of people. Increasingly, the team at Wizards has been making sure to bring on cultural consultants, or artists and writers who can draw on their own heritage in crafting the flavour of these sets. Fans seem to be responding well. The graphs are all going up. Last year, Wizards decided to change the name of the 2016 real-world-India-inspired plane Kaladesh (cludged together from Hindi words) to Avishkar, as it turned out one of the words forming the original name had unfortunate connotations. They're making an effort. Again, it's expensive when you get it wrong; you might have to shelve a novel or two.

The truth is that Magic: The Gathering has always been about escapism—or perhaps to use another word, empowerment. The very game itself is about collecting these cards to make a powerful deck that enables you to win. It's quite literally about being able to step out of one world, and into another. It's about evoking the kind of feelings that are rare or absent from our own humdrum lives. In the '90s, it was empowering to a certain kind of dork who got bullied a lot. Now it tries to be empowering for everyone. Check out Daretti's sick wheelchair.

People play Magic: The Gathering all over the world. Of course they want to see themselves represented in the game. If Kamigawa was borne from a place of Orientalism, exoticisation, then newer planes feel like they're at least coming from a place of inclusivity.

III. Agents of Artifice

This post started out because I wanted to review Agents of Artifice, and if it's taken me so long to get to the point, then it's only because I felt it was important to have all this in mind.

See, when I googled "Agents of Artifice EPUB", I didn't find an EPUB, but I did find a tweet observing how Agents of Artifice fans will always have an EPUB to share on the off chance they finally convince someone to read it. Except the way the tweet wrote the words, they weren't praise, it turned them into a cutting insult.

So this was great news for me! Already, I'd found out that there are two types of people, Agents of Artifice fans, and other people, and I was incredibly excited to learn which of these categories I fell into. I had a sneaking suspicion that Agents of Artifice might be a shibboleth for the tension inherent to the MTG playerbase, between the enfranchised players who came up with the game in the '90s—the kind of people who might unironically enjoy a yellowy fantasy paperback, assuming they can read—and, well, everyone else.

It took me a while to get through the book, mostly because I wasn't enjoying it very much for most of it.

From pretty much the word go, the prose is a cut above what I come to expect from MTG fiction:

The ground rolled, and it was not ground. Shifting grays and black—not a color so much as a lack of color—formed a surface scarcely less treacherous than quicksand. Through it, deep beneath it, high above it in what could hardly be called a sky, snaked rivers of fire, of lightning, of liquid earth and jagged water, of raw mana. Colors unseen by human eyes flew overhead, refusing to congeal, soaring on wings of forgotten truths, borne aloft by stray gusts. Mountains of once and future worlds wept tears of sorrow for realities that never were, unchosen futures that no other would ever mourn.

Like, it's not anything to write home about, except by this comparison. "Wept tears of sorrow", c'mon, just say "wept"! Clumsy repetition of the word "future" in that last sentence, too. This extract, from the very start of the book, is definitely a little bit annoying, a little bit affected, a little bit trying too hard. But, like, it's not bad. It's got ideas. It's trying to do something with the English language.

Unfortunately, I don't know, the start of this novel is just a slog. The prologue, quoted above, is told between two deliberately-unspecified figures, making some kind of vague pact; it's like every dogshit prologue you've ever read. After that, we're dropped into our POV character of Kallist, a guy invented just for this novel, so you know he's going to be boring as fuck. And he is! He's completely infatuated with Liliana Vess, the aforementioned Angelina Jolie black-aligned necromancer Planeswalker, and he resents that she seems to be leading him on, which she sort of is. There's a suffocating tinge of male heterosexuality that unfortunately taints the book in many places, not just on an object/plot level, but in the prose itself. Anyway, they've been hiding in a backwater part of Ravnica, the infinite-city plane, but their luck runs out and a mercenary captures them, hoping to track down Jace Beleren, the blue-aligned telepath Planeswalker who's the book's actual protagonist. They escape, and travel across the city to warn Jace.

Then there's a twist!

I wouldn't say that it's a particularly good twist. The rest of this review will necessarily go into spoilers, but just to keep things spoiler-free for now, I'll stop playing hard-to-get and say what I actually think of this book: if you like Magic: The Gathering and like reading, you could do a lot worse than this one. It definitely has its moments.

In fact, what Agents of Artifice has over the rest of it is precisely the fact that it's a novel written to promote nothing in particular, but Magic: The Gathering itself, in the abstract. Beyond the executive mandate that it feature so-and-so characters, it's clear that Ari Marmell is just getting to write whatever the fuck he wants. So there are bits in there that feel like they're not about communicating the mechanical beat-by-beat of someone else's synopsis, but rather are trying to communicate some kind of feeling, drawn from life.

Take Ravnica, for existence. In the game, Ravnica's identity is defined by the ten "guilds", factions based on the possible pairings of the five colors; in expansions set on Ravnica, nearly all the cards fall into one of these guilds or another, and the storylines are defined by inter-guild politics. When Ravnica last showed up in the lore prior to Agents of Artifice, I gather that the plot ended with the guilds collapsing? But a few years later, when the game returned to Ravnica in Return to Ravnica, the guilds were back, because that was what players expected. Agents of Artifice was written with a different status-quo in mind, where the guilds really were gone. The truth is that Ravnica's guilds don't really resemble reality; a city's population just isn't divided into a dozen color-coded factions of equal power and prominence. So here, Ravnica instead has the texture of a real city. Its world-spanning sprawl becomes overwhelming, isolating, alienating; outside of your few friends, there are all of these people who you cannot relate to or connect with in any form, and some of them might want to hurt you, and you feel like you're falling between the cracks in the paving stones, slipping into the gutter. At one point, Jace and Liliana commiserate that, although they could flee to any other part of the multiverse if they so chose, there is a baseline commodity to the city that simply does not exist anywhere. And isn't that how it is, with city life?

Jace and Liliana are these phenomenally unique and powerful individuals, but they can't use their talents, because they're in hiding. The sections of the story concerned with this are defined by a sense of suffocating frustration and impotency, of a feeling that you are destined for great things, to go to great places, but are instead trapped by circumstance. It's about this feeling that you could literally step outside if you wanted, but you can't, you can't, you can't.

And look, I think I just read this novel at the right point in my life, for that to mean something to me. Maybe it would mean something to you too.

Alright, you've had your fair warning. Like I say, this book has a twist, a couple of twists in fact, and while they're not great, the story does hinge on them.

The big spoiler is that Kallist, the POV we're following for the first chunk of the book, is actually Jace, who in a telepathic semi-accident has swapped minds with Kallist, who's been living under the delusion that he's Jace, in turn. When they meet again, the real Kallist (who thinks he's Jace) gets killed, and the effect reverses, so Jace (who, until now, we think is Kallist) remembers who he is and what he's done. At this point, the book makes this big jump back in time to show events from Jace's perspective, as he's recruited by another Planeswalker, the obviously-evil artificer Tezzeret, into a multiversal "Consortium" that seeks to accrue power from across the different planes. That's where he befriends Kallist, a non-Planeswalker assassin. The Consortium pays Jace very well, and his skills as a mage improve under Tezzeret's tutelage, but Tezzeret is an abusive boss who demands increasingly immoral actions from him, and before long, Jace realises that he can't get out. Eventually, there's a line that he refuses to cross, and he decides to go into hiding instead, forced to take Kallist with him as the man is implicated by their friendship. They meet Vess and have a love triangle, but eventually the Consortium tracks them down. Desperate to escape, Jace hatches a plan to carry Kallist with him to another plane, by stealing the man's mind and implanting it into a body on another world, but his abilities fail him, causing their minds to swap instead.

The second big twist, which actually gets revealed to the reader in the form of dramatic irony, is that Liliana actually betrays Jace to Tezzeret at several points in the book; she's the one who leads the Consortium to them, she's one of the unnamed figures in the prologue, who's making a deal to hide her own scheme from Jace's telepathy. I feel pretty confident that if you actually untangled the nonchronological storytelling and put it under a microscope, you'd find that her actions make no fucking sense whatsoever, just in terms of the basic logic. Still, it more or less passes the squint test. The gist is that Liliana wants to take over the Consortium—not to have it for herself, but as payment for Nicol Bolas, the evil dragon Planeswalker who used to run the Consortium, the other figure from the prologue, the only being in existence powerful enough to free her from a demon's curse. She's not powerful enough to beat Tezzeret by herself, so instead she wins his confidence and tries to manipulate Jace into challenging him. After the mind-swap accident happens, she pushes the situation to force Jace and Kallist back together hoping that if Kallist dies, the effect will reverse; she's right. The sections where Jace and Liliana are working together to plot Tezzeret's downfall are the best in the book, easily.

I'm struggling to really boil down the plot here, but I promise that relative to the book's length, surprisingly little actually happens in it. The early sections, first concerning Kallist, then concerning Jace's time in the Consortium, feel almost obligatory, very episodic, like Marmell is going through the motions to get to the bit he's actually interested in. There's a visit to Kamigawa, and to a few throwaway planes invented for this book, which of course in classic MTG media tradition aren't given names.

The thing is that a lot of these terribly mid plot-by-numbers scenes actual pay off within the narrative in surprisingly compelling ways. In a vacuum, the prologue reads as pure dreck, but revisited with the knowledge that the two figures are Liliana and Nicol Bolas... yeah, you know what, Marmell was kind of cooking there! There's an eyeroll-inducing training scene where Tezzeret gets Jace to summon increasingly powerful creatures to fight a horrible jellyfish robot of his, and then at the end of the book, when Tezzeret and Jace fight in earnest, there's another big scene where Jace has to beat an even bigger construct of his, and it's actually entertaining. The excursion to Kamigawa serves to characterise the minor book-only Planeswalker pyromancer Baltrice; you think the payoff is that at the midpoint of the book, Baltrice allows Jace to get away because she owes him for saving her life on Kamigawa. But no, it turns out that the real payoff is at the very end of the book, when Jace reaches his limit and still just can't fucking beat Tezzeret, he ends up luring the weakened artificer to Kamigawa, to let the locals get their revenge for what Tezzeret did to their village.

The truth is that, once it gets going, there's some cool stuff in here. Jace and Tezzeret escape from a heat-seeking monster by deliberately almost freezing themselves to death. Liliana trails Baltrice to Tezzeret's lair by sneaking a phantom into the package she's carrying, then summoning the phantom back from across the Blind Infinities after Baltrice planeswalks away with it. After Jace gets poisoned by Tezzeret, he has Liliana summon a vampire to suck out his blood. Again, at its best, there's this beautiful clash-of-aesthetics, such as when Jace and Liliana fight and scheme their way through Tezzeret's fantasy-factory sanctum.

More often, though, the big, memorable moments are actually times when Jace's power completely fucking fails him. During that first training scene with Tezzeret, where all of his summons just job horribly against the construct, one after the other. When he tries to shield Tezzeret's thoughts from Nicol Bolas, and the dragon just runs circles around him. When he's fleeing the Consortium goons in a crowded marketplace, and winds up accidentally killing a bunch of bystanders by calling a drake to save his own neck, and he feels their dying thoughts all at once. When he botches the mind-swap. Whenever he tries to use an illusion or telepathy on a zombie, or a golem, or some other mindless creature. When he tries to planeswalk away during his fight with Tezzeret, and he finds that he can't. When he still, after everything, just can't quite win.

It's obvious that Marmell is a writer who's cut his teeth working on RPG sourcebooks, because there's a sensibility to his writing that isn't quite at the level of "rational fiction", but which is nevertheless trying to be clever in a gamelike way. There are mechanisms in the world that can be used to contrive and resolve conflicts using oblique means, and even if it doesn't quite make sense, it at least feels like a system of cause and effect.

My favourite bit of descriptive work comes during Jace and Liliana's visit to Nicol Bolas on Grixis, a necromantic plane made out of dead tissue. The prose absolutely luxuriates in the description of a landscape composed of flesh, bone, boils, scabs, and abscesses, crawling with corpses that want nothing more than to kill, and Liliana is right at home there, possessed of more power than she knows what to do with. Goths are fucking crazy, yo. There's this raw-as-hell bit where Nicol Bolas gets one of his clairvoyants to spy on Jace and Liliana as they arrive, and the way she does this is by peeling the cornea from this guy she's been horribly torturing, and placing it in her own eye... and it's not the squick of this moment that got to me, it was the way her partner's like "gee, I'm glad this guy's still got his other cornea for next time, it's such a pain in the ass when we have to stake a new screaming torture shmuck to the ground".

The thing about the the multiverse, what draws me to Magic: The Gathering as a setting, is the idea of a place that exemplifies a kind of emotional reality. What if the rules of a genre were actually baked into the fabric of a world itself? What if you could take a thin slice of experience, and sort of extrapolate out a whole world from that one feeling? Grixis, then, reads as a reflection of Nicol Bolas, villainy taking place on a scale that just cannot be comprehended in a human lifespan, you can look from one horizon to the other and still not see all the corpses. The icy plane where Tezzeret and Jace meet (and flee from) Bolas reflects Tezzeret's cold treatment of Jace, and in turn the moral coldness that Jace has adopted by this point.

This is all just flavour, though. What the book is doing that's interesting, to me, is in those emotional stakes, the character work. Kallist says of Jace at the midway point: "He uses people he should trust, trusts people he should avoid, and avoids people he could use." The clairvoyant says of him: "He walks the intentions of others as easily as he walks between worlds, but knows not his own." Jace is cowardly and indecisive, often an honestly pathetic figure, cringing away from opportunities to change his own situation, making constant moral compromises and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. His solution to conflict is usually to reduce the other person to a vegetative state (that reminds me, in addition to the occasional sexism, you get some light ableism, and some blatant fatphobia with one particular character, just for spice I suppose).

He has this fierce loyalty to Kallist, but Kallist is really just some fucking guy, an assassin who just happens to be nice to Jace, and Jace's self-centred actions directly ruin Kallist's life. Funnily enough, the book at one point goes out of its way to remark that they're not gay, despite their close history, but y'know what, there's such a rich dynamic of mutual debt and jealousy there that it's hard not to be compelled by their platonic interactions regardless. Like I say, Kallist is boring, but as a foil to Jace, he works: he has less power, fewer moral compunctions, and he's happier for it... except of course, to Liliana, Kallist hardly registers. There's an asymmetry to his friendship with Jace, and again, I've had asymmetrical friendships.

As for Liliana, considering the kind of book this is, she gets a surprising amount of interiority, a desperation that drives her, a frustration with Jace, the faintest trace of guilt over her deception. The title, Agents of Artifice, refers most literally to Tezzeret, but Jace and Liliana are also both defined by lies, illusion, and self-delusion. The romantic ambiguity experienced by Kallist (actually Jace) at the start of the book turns out to have multiple explanations, as Liliana knows that he's not entirely Kallist nor Jace, and she's planning to betray Jace anyway, she just has mixed feelings about it. And it's like, yeah, I've liked people and not known if they liked me back.

Tezzeret is a fantastic villain, if a bit too obviously evil from the start, precisely because Jace has a sinking feeling that Tezzeret might really be that bad, but nevertheless hopes (wrongly) that he can be reasoned with. Tezzeret is fallible, occasionally afraid even, struggling to keep his own anger in check, domineering and cruel in a way that few people are. But, y'know, I've had a boss who sucks.

IV. Disempowerment

A while ago, I realised that I was playing Dungeons & Dragons wrong.

I've played with a few different groups of friends, and unfortunately, many of my friends have treated it less like a roleplaying game, and more like a wargame. It's a form of escapism that seeks to populate little labyrinths with subhuman, subsentient creatures who can be slaughtered en masse, their homes looted of everything that isn't nailed down. It's about finding clever ways of killing things, or if you can't come up with something clever, then just rolling the dice, over and over. It's about learning new spells and having the numbers go up, so you can fight and kill in more powerful and complicated ways.

And when I've played Magic: The Gathering, with different friends, they play the card game in much the same way, as an exercise in constructing elaborate combos, turns that take forever, a game of reading cards that say "all creatures", of swinging for lethal.

When I was a teen, my mum would drive me home from D&D, and my dad would always ask, "did you win?" And I would be like, no, Dad, you don't get it, you don't win in D&D, it's not that sort of game. It never sunk in. But I think part of what rankled me about that question was the fact that, on some deeper, truer level, he was right. My friends played D&D to win. Our characters were just representations of ourselves, not as we were, but as we wanted to be.

And I guess I just wanted something different, I was always pushing the games to be different. When the Dungeon Master instructed me to level up between sessions, I would "forget", leave my numbers a little smaller. My hit points remained comically small, even as the monsters grew comically powerful, such that a single hit would always knock me out. My character was a coward, a slimy little creature that would hug the corners, throwing spells and lying out his ass, at once scared shitless and bored out of his mind.

Look, I'm sure you can tell me lots of stories about the Dungeons & Dragons game you played that was nothing like this, where you were actually doing the whole "collaborative storytelling" shebang, building up these character arcs and overcoming your flaws and having things go wrong and, well, roleplaying. I'm sure you had lots of fun. I don't want to fucking hear it. Have you ever listened to someone describe something that happened in a tabletop game? It's like having someone recount a dream at you. It's either fuck boring, narrative white noise, or it's an embarrassingly real glimpse of the person's id.

You could put me in the fuckin' lotus-eater machine if you like, and I would lose my mind, I'd pluck out my own eyes and turn mean, hole up in a cupboard somewhere and kill anything that got close. I don't like myself, and I don't like the things I want, all I've got in me that's any good is a spiteful, righteous energy, half a conscience, I guess, and the jealously-kept dregs of the cleverness that defined me growing up. These days, I mostly just feel stupid, blind to the feelings of others, wasting away.

I think what I'm saying is that, in the end, I liked Agents of Artifice because I saw myself represented in it.

Appendix: The Spreadsheet

I'm not quite ready to share that spreadsheet, because, like, I haven't test-driven it, and honestly am not sure I ever will.

As I alluded to earlier, all these old MTG novels are out of print. I was able to track down Kindle listings for 35 publications, which by my count leaves approximately 50 books which you just can't read, period. Or, like, you can buy someone's dog-eared paperback on eBay, but it'll cost you far more than any of these stories are worth. There's no particular logic to the missing books, apart from the fact that all 12 HarperPrism books are missing (maybe they're tied up with rights issues).

Now, sales figures are a corporate secret, but I'd be interested to know exactly how much money Wizards of the Coasts makes off these ebooks. I wasn't even able to find half of them on the Amazon store without doing some roundabout google-fu. I'm also curious to know what sort of contracts they were written under, if Wizards owns these texts outright (I assume so, that's how it normally works) or if they have to pay a few pennies in royalties to the authors every time someone buys a copy. Especially taking into account that it's easier to, uh, download ebooks free online, they can't be making much, right?

It seems to me that the actual value of paywalling this stuff is that it doesn't meet the editorial standards of today, and "you have to pay a fiver to read this" is a great way to get around the Streisand effect: it's not that there are lost, forbidden MTG novels, they're right there, it's just that no-one is reading them, certainly no-one is paying to read them. Even dating back to the time of their publication, the reviews on the expansion tie-in books are generally merciless. The most common criticism seems to be that jack shit happens in them.

And indeed, that's a product of multimedia storytelling for a game like this, because you have to release ~three products over the course of a year, and a set of randomized trading cards is good at representing a single time and place, not a story with a sequential narrative. This was what MTG was struggling with during the Weatherlight Saga; if the story is on the cards, and the cards all get shuffled, how the fuck is a player supposed to know what order anything's happening in? So instead, narratives in the MTG universe basically got distilled down to this: here's a high-concept fantasy world. There's a big change and the world is put in turmoil. Finally, the world is in a new state. Ravnica has guilds which suffer Dissension until finally the Guildpact breaks. The disparate Shards of Alara undergo a Conflux which results in Alara Reborn as a unified plane. It's less an exercise in plot, and more an exercise in worldbuilding, flavour, because that's all it needs to be. The contract writers get handed off this big-picture outline, and about all they can do is populate the world, ground it in a POV, who futzes around sightseeing until the world-shaking event happens.

So yeah, this place is not a place of honor, no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. I can totally see an argument that there's no reason to make this stuff accessible, because the only result of that would be that the human race wastes more of its precious time on it.

Except it's nothing so intentional, is it? As I say, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to which books are available for purchase, and which don't.

In a similar vein: by my count, there were probably just over a hundred Uncharted Realms short stories published on the Magic: The Gathering website prior to the switch to serialised webfiction. Of those, fifteen have vanished. The website has undergone multiple overhauls and migrations, and pretty much the entire article archive got wiped out, barring a few pieces (such as the serials) which someone made the effort to preserve. As the site was well-trafficked, pretty much everything can be found on the Wayback Machine, though retrieving it is a little tricky as a change to the site's URL schema means you have to know the old schema, the links on the wiki (which got migrated to the new schema) aren't reliably archived.

At a glance, I actually like the new "Magic Story" page. It's organized by year and expansion, beginning with the first serialised arc, Khans of Tarkir. The current expansion is right at the top for easy access. They've even released ebook compilations from time to time.

But, like, I do have some notes.

There's a few ordering issues, first of all. Magic Origins and Battle for Zendikar are swapped, a few of the individual stories are muddled up. Honestly, though, the real problem is just that the page doesn't know what to do with the side-stories. In earlier years, the MTG webfiction consisted of nothing but side-stories, written to complement the traditionally-published books. There was a transitional period where you're getting the serials, but still occasional one-offs furthering the long-term arcs, or even just interrupting the story to promote a supplementary product. For newer arcs, there's an explicit distinction drawn between the main story (divided into numbered "episodes") and the concurrently-published side stories, which are siloed off into a separate list, with no explanation for how they relate to the episodic plotline. I get that from an audience perspective, most MTG fans might just want to follow along with the main arc. And from an authorial perspective, for the most part, one person handles the main arc, and the side-stories are written by other people. But, c'mon! Are we doing multimedia storytelling, or not? Tell me how it all fits together.

The easiest thing for me, then, is to view the webfiction in the article archive from oldest-to-newest, read it that way. But a-ha, not so fast! During the big migration, a lot of the articles appear to have had their dates changed by accident. Currently, you get two random republished Weatherlight Saga stories from The Duelist in 1997, dated to 2007 for whatever reason; there's no indication what they are, both just launch straight into the prose. Then, there's "The Shadows of Prahv, Part 2". And look, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure there should be a "Part 1" somewhere before that.

Ah, but it's not just that the stories are out of order: it's that half of them are in the "Magic Story" category, and a bunch of them are in the "Feature" category. So it's physically impossible to view them all in a single list. And fifteen of them are missing altogether.

Remember how I mentioned that Brandon Sanderson novella? It came out in 2018, and less than two years later, it was taken down. It's been gone for half a decade. It turns out that the reason for this was that Sanderson had requested Wizards release a print edition for charity, and Wizards was like "Sure!", took down the download to push the charity edition, and then never got around to actually releasing the charity edition until now. I mean, hey, these things happen.

To the Wizards webmaster reading this: put me in, coach. Let me at your backend. I promise I'll be good. I'll restore those missing stories, fix the dating and category issues, correctly tag everything by plane and character. I'll curate the one-off side stories at the appropriate places alongside the main arcs. I'll make that shit more readable than it ever was. I'm in it for the love of the game, babey.

Oh, and to the Vorthos reading this, if you want to see the spreadsheet, hit up my DMs. Be nice for someone who's actually read this stuff to check my work, if I end up persevering with it. I've successfully retrieved archive links for the entire run of Savor the Flavor articles from the Wayback machine, a resource that I'm pretty sure doesn't currently exist on the web, I just don't have time to port it to the wiki right now.

And to everyone else, maybe you're wondering if I liked any of the stuff I read. Yes! One short story did stick with me. It's "A Hollow Body", by Aysha U. Farah, from the Phyrexia: All Will Be One arc. Certain followers of mine might recognise that name, and that's because Farah was one of the post-canon Homestuck writers. Indeed, there's clear influence from Homestuck in the short story, most directly in the interesting use of second-person narration. That one's good.

Addendum: please help me budget this. my multimedia product is dying

My friend Sam had this to say about this article:

I'm baffled by the idea of doing a fantasy novel twice a year to coincide with releases for your card game / a thing that sounds really hard to do at any level of quality and also totally ineffective as a marketing tool

It's an interesting point, isn't it? I think it generalises to a lot of these multimedia properties. It's the idea that the story is written almost begrudgingly—something the company is merely obligated to do, because without some kind of story, the product cannot exist. People cannot be made to care about it.

But of course, nobody likes to read, these days. So the question becomes, how do you communicate this story to the audience? The MTG website has experimented with various abridged summaries and recaps and stuff in the past, they've tried adding little flavour cards to the booster packs, or having "Story Spotlights" on cards themselves.

If you read any of the webfiction, it's obvious that what you're reading is no more definitive a window into the MTG universe than the cards themselves. It's as if these are merely facets of some underlying, true, canonical version of events, which exists less in the mind of any writer or game designer, but more in the creative director, the marketer.

Here's another part from that Brady Dommermuth post I quoted earlier:

Please know that across the 66 published Magic novels, we have tried every combination of more/less creative control, more/less time, and more/less money. No combination of those elements guarantees a great novel. (And I'll reiterate that the novels you think are great are generally in the bottom half sales-wise, and the novels you loathe are generally in the top half. There are exceptions.) Great novels are rare, and many of them take YEARS to write.

When it comes to Agents of Artifice, Dommermuth is spot on. It was only Ari Marmell's second novel. He had a lot of creative freedom on it. It didn't do crazy, "sales-wise". In that case, you can see that they just sort of rolled the dice, and got the result they got. As a novel, it's pretty good but not great.

What I think Brady sort of misses, here, is that good writers are good.

Like, again in discussing this piece, the one piece of MTG fiction that any of my pals could bring up was that Sanderson novella. Sanderson is a huge name in fantasy. I've only read extracts of his work, but I understand what he does and why people enjoy it. Of course if you get Sanderson to write a Magic: The Gathering story, people will like it! There's something so laughably backward about the fact that it was Sanderson who came to Wizards of the Coast with that novella. Like, it makes sense, he's at a level of success where you can't really pay him to do that, he was only ever going to do it for free. But Sanderson isn't the only good fantasy writer.

To me, there is something trivially self-evident to the idea that, if you're going to make an expansion themed around a fantasy murder-mystery... then you find an established fantasy murder-mystery writer whose work is well-liked, and you pay them to write a mystery for you.

Well, you can argue, they tried that, when they got Greg Weisman to do the War of the Spark novels, and it backfired spectacularly. Sure. I'd argue, firstly, that Weisman is predominantly a TV writer, not a prose writer, so of course his prose is going to kind of suck. And secondly, if you're bringing on people who aren't already intimately familiar with your property, then editorial really has to be heavily involved to stop stuff like the Chandra thing happening. That's the responsibility of the editor, not the writer.

Magic: The Gathering is a game which relies on building long-term audience investment, people who get hooked with a certain expansion and then will come back for more. You need those people to buy-in not just to the rules and mechanics of the game, but to the creative identity of the game, as well. And so if the expansions are mostly standalone from one to the next, if you're going to be rotating which writer handles the story every single time, to me it seems like a perfect opportunity to invest in the story, and hire authors who've shown they're able to hook readers, have them moonlight for a single storyline that will leave an impression on people. I'm not even talking about traditionally-published writers; the fantasy genre in particular means it's possible to take advantage of the talent in webfiction or Kindle self-publishing. That shit does numbers.

Then again, I guess you don't need to have your own creative identity. If you do enough crossovers, your consumers will always be able to find something they care about in your product. You can just cash in on that existing audience goodwill.

And I guess, if I'm being cynical, maybe that well never runs dry. Even after everyone who saw Star Wars in theaters is dead and gone, maybe the nostalgia machine can chug along still, convince the kids they care about it too, ensure that they too can recognise the icons. There's something timeless about Star Wars, isn't there?

But I don't know, maybe one day the bottom will fall out, and audiences will just stop caring. For me, it feels like in mass media, it's the writing that's consistently undervalued. With movies and TV shows, you have hundreds and thousands of people and millions of dollars involved in getting the look and sound and feel of the thing exactly right... in service of a script that just sucks. Dommermuth is right, that it seems like there's very little correlation between the quality of a story and its popularity; it feels entirely arbitrary. So I guess the numbers don't lie, and it doesn't matter if you invest in good writing or not.

It would just be really convenient for me, personally, if it did matter.

[madsims4finds]

I keep seeing articles about InZoi not being a Sims killer and I’m just like

But I get it cause for some people, that really was the expectation.

But something I’ve said from the beginning is that the sims franchise needs competition. I’ve also said that none of the games coming would some how eliminate the sims. It’s entirely too big of a franchise, and like I’ve said in posts before, it’s EA’s bread and butter. They’re not just going to give up on the sims due to competition like they did with Sim City. They just didn’t give a fuck to try again with Sim City cause they hadn’t made anything from that franchise in decades anyway. “Sim killer” in my definition means something that could become more popular than the sims, regulating the sims to the proverbial backseat of the life simulator genre. But not to actually make the sims go away entirely. It’s never going away. The hope is that with competition, they do better. They feel pushed to do better. That’s why I’ve always said if you’re a sims fan, play the game you want. And stop attacking the devs of the other games because their goal is not to kill off the sims. Even if it was, which I do view Paralives trying very hard to be sims like (ie direct competition), it’s still not going to kill them off.

I think players expectations of a sims killer got to the devs of InZoi too because the way the lead dev had to come out and say hey we love and admire the sims team and have the utmost respect for what they do, was definitely them trying to avoid their game crashing and burning due to unfairly high expectations. Or trying to avoid sims fans review bombing with negativity.

From the first trailer, and bits of information we’ve received since, InZoi is not the sims. It’s not going to play like the sims. It’s just the same genre. So I’m looking forward to the new gameplay mechanics that InZoi brings that’s not based on things the sims franchise has done. And I look forward to the things that maybe the sims franchise HAS done and InZoi just improved upon it. I’m also looking forward to changes and improvement because it is early access after all. But either way, I want it to be its own, unique thing. I still look forward to Paralives more than InZoi, only cause that’s a life sim I would actually want to play on the pc that gives me a closer to sims experience vibe. But InZoi is literally a god simulator. I mean you’re controlling cities with 300 people living in them… 300 people per city by the way. That’s insane. I do love the idea of the npc’s being powered by AI so that they can live lives completely out of my control. Interacting with the environment around them on their own and even starting relationships or families on their own? I love that! I like legacy play so I’m with a particular household for a long fucking time. I want the world around them to change and grow with them with out my direct influence, so I look forward to that.

And before you start preaching, no I do not believe AI is inherently bad. Like all new technologies it’s going to bring change, but what’s important is how it’s used and what it’s used for. There are very clear lines in the sand for things that AI shouldn’t be used for. But it doesn’t make AI inherently evil. People doing nefarious shit with the AI like trying to rob actors of their likeness and voices without proper compensation, consent, or notification, that’s evil. Not trying to convince you of anything though, just making it clear where I stand.

But I know Paralives is probably not going to do the same thing. I’m sure it’ll be a bit more similar to sims as far as control over the town. I mean story progression would be nice at least.

Anywho, before I get too far from my point, these are fun times. I mean, not really but in regards to gaming 😅. I’m not playing InZoi in early access, but I’m looking forward to seeing the gameplay of others and learning more about the game. And we’ve been promised but I hope it does eventually come to consoles cause InZoi on a PS5?! 🤌🏽. Talk about visually stunning. Outside of the Urbz and maybe Castaways (never played that one), the sims have failed at console versions in my opinion so I really want that void filled. Cause I play more on console than pc and I love this new era of pc games coming to console.

So I guess the articles are called for in a sense but let’s just all give the game a fair shot. I’m begging you….

Okay not really 🤣🤣🤣 ima play it regardless.